Posted on January 27, 2024.
In this extensive conversation, Michael chats with Spencer Russell Smith about his plans for growing his subscription, producing chapters consistently, and how he will make subscriptions a worthwhile part of his business.
This is the last episode in the Subscription Workshop Series and was recorded roughly 8 months ago :).
Spencer Russell Smith’s Website: https://www.spencerrussellsmith.com/
#66 Episode Transcript:
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Subscriptions for Authors podcast. Now, this episode was filmed like eight months ago. I know this is like a theme, but the theme’s ending because I’m getting all the episodes out today. We filmed a long time ago, and this one was with none other than Spencer Russell Botticelli Smith, who is an incredible author, who’s been in the Facebook group, I want to say almost since the beginning.
And Spencer has been writing serial fiction, he’s a fantasy author, also has some other special pen names on the side, and in this conversation we cover his full strategy from how he’s launching a new pen name, how he’s launching his subscription, how he’s looking to market his subscription, how he’s planning on his production, how he’s writing ahead, how he’s thinking through scheduling, and It is in depth, it is intense, it is amazing.
And if you are looking to be able to walk through your subscription and learn how you can grow it, how you can think through it, how you can set it up, this is the episode for you. You really are getting a live conversation between me and Spencer, recorded in person, about how to think through these things.
So I hope you enjoy it. Huge thanks to Spencer for coming on. I wish we got this out earlier. Um, so my apologies to you, Spencer, for not getting this out earlier. Now, if y’all want to actually get access to all the content we publish, whether it’s our blogs, our fireside chats, the best place is the newsletter.
If you’re not part of our newsletter, go to subscriptionsforothers. com. It’s linked down below. Just enter in your email, we’ll send you a free book. So, that’s really fun. In addition to getting a free book, which is always awesome, you are also going to be able to get weekly updates on all the content we publish, which we regularly publish a lot of content, whether it’s blog posts, whether it’s, um, the podcast, whether it’s fireside chats, we’re always here trying to make your life better as a subscription author.
Now, we’re gonna jump into this episode, basically now, and in the next episode, I’ll have a special update, but you’re gonna have to wait till the next episode for that. Okay, in this one, let’s dive into it.
this is our first time recording and in person podcast episode, so thank you for coming down. Yeah, of course. Yeah, no this is super fun. And I know you’ve been in the group for a long time. I feel like I’ve known you cuz we’ve followed your journey for so long. But share with everyone listening a bit up to this point, what your subscription journey has looked like and specifically I know your journey in serial fiction.
Yeah I actually had a failed attempt at subscription probably back in I think 2018 or 17 maybe, which makes me feel very old. Cuz it doesn’t seem that long ago. But where I had started writing a serial fiction piece on Reddit under a pen name that I still have. The pen name lasted the subscription I’ve had to revamp.
But I was just putting out chapters for free on Reddit. I think at that point, cuz I’d done enough pre-writing I was doing. Two chapters per week and that ended up not being sustainable. So I slowed down to a week and then one every two weeks. And I had set up a Patreon but I hadn’t really heard of early access for that.
Like I, in my brain, the only really viable thing for Patreon was I need to either make it fully paid, which I didn’t want to do, or I need to offer, like bonuses or perks or something, which I didn’t, I couldn’t really think of. Yeah. And I was, that was just something that I was doing to make sure that I was always writing some prose every single day while working on my main fiction under my own name.
Cuz that I do a lot of pretty heavy outlining. And so I was just posting it for free for a very long time. I actually did get I think probably like $150 over the course of a year on Patreon just from people who wanted to support me. And I think probably like 50 or $60 on Cofi. Not bad. Yeah. But then I basically, I just, because I was posting them on Reddit and the posting process on Patreon wasn’t great at that point.
I just didn’t feel. Doing the same thing and putting it all on there when my main subscriber base was on Reddit at the time. Yeah. And so I just kept it there. A few of those fell off, but then once I, I kept it going since then basically. And when I heard, I think, I don’t know if you were talking, I think it might have just been Amelia on the self-publishing show.
Yeah. That was, that I’ve been listening to. I think I immediately jumped over to the podcast and searched out the Facebook group and everything and started talking with you guys and looking at everything there. And I think August of 2022 was when I got the idea to try subscription and I basically soft launched my Patreon again in like late December of this past year.
And hard launched on basically first week of January. Yeah. And a little bit before that I had tried some serial fiction on Kind Bella, which I’ve made money from bonuses, but the bonuses can be nice. The bonuses were nice. Yeah. But I haven’t really gotten too much of a following on kind Bella.
Cause I’m really. Not sure how to direct people there. That’s just a very different game. Especially with not safe for work home. Yeah. Content, which is what that pen is. And I tried doing a few kind of cereal novellas on interesting Kindle which hadn’t really worked too well.
Okay. Cuz I, a few complaints were, I wasn’t clear, it wasn’t clear that this was a serial novella. But so what I did was I ended up taking my free story, which is still going, that’s back to a chapter or two a week, cuz I do it based on word count. Yeah. So if I have two chapters that are short, I’ll usually post them both in the same week.
I’m posting now on both what Pad and Reddit. And on Patreon only I have two exclusive stories. Nice. Or exclusive. I make it clear that you can access this another way, but you’re only gonna be access it either through paying through kind, paying through this. And most of my readers either don’t wanna bother with kind Vela cuz it’s not something they’re familiar with and they’re more familiar with Patreon.
Or they’re outside of the us in which case they can’t access. Kendall Bella. And then the other one, which I was actually surprised that people are paying for, I think it’s, I think it’s actually the second. Most popular tier on there is a revised version of the cereal novels that I had tried publishing and so Oh, okay.
With those, I think I’m about up to 21 subscribers as of this morning and I think $150 a month. Wow. Which is my I think I talked with you a while ago. My very realistic, not trying to shoot too high goal was, three subscribers a month each month and yeah, I’m, I’m 80% of the way there to my goal for of the year, so it’s pretty good recording.
It’s exciting in April, by the way,
just about quarter of the year. So that’s amazing. There’s a lot to unpack there cuz I’m immediately thinking like, how are you keeping up with this? Because you have multiple pen names, you’re writing all these different stories that you’re serializing Yes.
All these different platforms. Like both from like just your time, but then also organizationally, like how do you mentally keep shy of it? Because, I’m just like listening to you. But this also does stress me out a little bit. So how do you like not stress
yourself out? So the. I’m still working on that part.
The one thing that I do that I think a lot of people I’ve seen worry about when thinking about starting a subscription on the Facebook group is a lot of people say, okay, I wanna start a subscription, but I don’t think that I can write at, one chapter, week two, chapter week. I don’t think I can write at that pace.
And when I see those, I usually go ahead and comment that is looking at it from the wrong way. I know you just want to jump in with your story that you may even have outlined, but that is, that’s what creates a problem with people not liking the subscription model. And with you essentially failing it as far as you’re concerned on the subscription model is that’s too much stress for most people.
That’s too much pressure. And I think that from a story perspective, that’s also not a good idea, especially depending on if you’re writing a genre like sci-fi or fantasy where you have world building to think about. I pre-write. Okay. I yeah. So I, with my three stories because you have to wait a while on kind Bella to not breach their terms to publish it anywhere else.
So that’s already a month long buffer that I have with what I’m publishing on. Ella, on that, I am, I think maybe. A month out, like I think I still have like probably another month worth of chapters. I could post releasing two chapters a week on that. But as far as my Patreon goes, which is the one I care more about, if I would have to pause or anything, I’ve essentially written 75% of that story for that single tier.
Great. And I think that’s gonna last me about a year at the rate that I’m releasing it, which is about, I think 1300 words a month. And then the other one that’s exclusive. I’ve written the entire thing. I just am revising it cuz I wanted to take it in Target a little bit. More of a niche audience with it.
Yeah. And then the main one that is free, that one is the one that gives me the most stress out of it because I, that one’s going to be probably going for another two or three years because I have a lot planned for those characters. But that one still before I, part of why I didn’t launch until January is because I wanted to give myself a three month buffer, which I had some unfortunate family stuff, some annoying work stuff happen over the past three months.
And so that three month buffer turned out to be a fantastic idea because now that I’ve gotten back into things, I’m, I think I’ve written up until probably so you got now
still a little
buffer now? Yeah. And I still have a little buffer and I’m basically just I have two main perspectives that I’m following in that story and I’ve written way ahead on one of those and now I’m just catching up on the other one so the pacing doesn’t get thrown off.
Yeah. Totally. But yeah, I’m a I use one note to organize. I don’t see a lot of people using that. I find it great cuz I love the collapsible outlines.
Actually I used to use OneNote one note’s underrated.
Yeah. Yeah. It, I like it a lot. And I like that you can have two windows open and be referencing everything.
But I essentially use that I, I am very detailed in my outlines in the basically steamy romance for my pen name. I don’t do as much outlining as I do for my sci-fi fantasy stuff. The world building there requires it. Yes. Sometimes. And a lot more character Yeah. Point of view. So a lot more to mesh together.
But yeah, I do a lot of outlining so that I know that I’m going to have a good story and I know where the story’s going before I write the first word of the draft.
That, that’s really, I think, helpful to people here, especially on the buffer part of it. Yeah. A lot of us put that’s, it’s huge.
Yeah. Because now hearing that I now understand okay, you have all this going on, but you really have in it already and you could feasibly change it, in the future you could change your schedule if somehow your. Changes. But it wouldn’t be like this instant change. It would be something you change once every six months.
Once every year. And I’m curious, cuz you mentioned 1300 words. For one of your sorry. 13,000. 13,000. Oh
okay. 13,000.
Sorry. Okay. Okay. Good clarification. Cause I was like interesting. That’s I’ve seen authors with around 1300 words still monetize a month. Yeah. But it’s less common.
13,000 words. A bit is a bit more of, I would say the average. So what we can do is actually pull up your subscription tiers if you’d like and start to look through them. Cause we have this monitory here. But before we get to that, I’m really looking at your subscription. There was a lot of questions that you had I know about subscriptions that honestly they were like, when you were asking them before we got on, I was like, these are like kind of difficult questions.
There’s not an easy answer to them. So I think it’ll be interesting to discuss cuz I wanna know what you’re thinking and I’ll share what I’m thinking. Cuz these are some advanced questions that I think we all have thought about as authors, which I mean very clearly. Like you’ve the subscription game, like you’re really doing it well.
So I think just to hear that outline and that, thank you. You’re using all these different platforms. Reddit, using Vela just to funnel back into your subscription that it’s really growing is is amazing. But you also then had this question around how do I basically balance the free or exclusive stuff I give my mailing list.
So stuff that you’re maybe not putting out in a platform to get new fans in, but something you’re trying to convince a. Who’s already on that platform to say, Hey, gimme your email. Yeah. And your question was, how do I balance that with content that I’m providing exclusively for paying people my subscription?
Yeah. And like to provide a little bit more context or like example, so that’s less nebulous of a question. For my own, my writing that I do under my own name, my sci-fi fantasy stuff, which I’m still working, I’m still doing the pre-writing for before setting up a subscription for that. I have a, an exclusive novella that I’ve written that is not only free to my mailing list, but exclusive to them.
So it’s not published on Amazon, it’s not published anywhere else. I only give it away via like book funnel or my mailing list automation. And so the thing that I’m trying to weigh is content that is free and exclusive to my list. Does my list necessarily extend to the patrons? Because that is maybe not everybody that’s on my subscription platform is going to want to get the weekly or bi, I think I do biweekly emails for that.
Some people might not. And then if somebody comes over from my mailing list to the subscription, They might think, okay, I was told, that this was exclusive benefit from the mailing list, but now these people are paying for it. Either, maybe that doesn’t seem fair to them.
Or you
get Yeah. You get this muddy water. Yeah. I think in general, like if you are using something like, as a mailing list freebie then it’s definitely not fair to then frame it as a benefit to anyone who’s paying. Yeah. So that, in terms of balancing that, one thing you could do in a sort of like early access model is if you want to, every once in a while, maybe once a year provide, an available or a longer short story to your list to keep that newsletter magnet fresh. You can then give that newsletter magnet early access inside of your subscription. So they’re only getting it exclusively for maybe three months and then it’s coming out of the subscription to the mailing list.
And that then is a little bit more fair cuz they’re still getting to read it before other people. Okay. But it’s not this idea that it’s going to be exclusive forever. And that’s one thing I always hesitate with authors when they use the word exclusive. Because I know what exclusive means to me as a reader, which means I’m only getting it here.
Yeah. And that might be true for a period of time, but having something, making a promise that something’s gonna be exclusive forever, no matter what it is. Like I’m gonna write this short story and it’s gonna be exclusive inside of my subscription forever. If you say that, That’s a very tough promise to follow through and not because it Yeah.
In your current business that it wouldn’t make sense. Your intentions are beautiful, but what happens one, if your subscription goes away one day because you just decide you don’t wanna run it anymore. Now obviously that seems a little less unfair to readers cause it’s like they’re probably not paying for it anymore and then you choose to put it elsewhere.
But there could be another world in which you decide, oh wow, there’s maybe an opportunity where someone came in and wants to license that story for another platform. Yeah. Maybe there’s something that you want to do to repurpose that content and put it in another format, whether that’s audio, whether you want to release it on a serial fiction platform.
Your content is your content and you as the author have the right to do with it what you want. And you don’t wanna necessarily restrict that freedom because you made all these promises where you might not have a publisher but you’ve essentially allotted your own rights to your work. Yeah. Out. I think you wanna be careful about that.
So what I’ve seen be like a good strategy cuz early access and exclusive in the world of subscriptions, I think is different. Early access, might only be like, it could be as little as a week. It could be a couple weeks, maybe a couple months. Nothing wrong with that. But what I’ve seen authors do when they say something’s exclusive, they don’t actually mean exclusive forever.
What they mean is one to two years. So it’s something that they have no intention of releasing any time soon. But this idea that maybe eventually all those newsletter magnets that you’ve had get bundled. A short story collection that you sell directly on your own website. Or even on a retailer.
And then that’s not exclusive to the subscription anymore. It allows you to still juice that IP more like you deserve that. Yeah. So one thing you could then say on your subscription is in a frequently asked question, when people are onboarded or maybe at the bottom of your about or section as an author you can say, Hey, when I use the word exclusive, that means like the exclusivity terms are one to two years. Something like that. Okay. You could say six months, but I would actually, if you want to be as honest as possible with your fans, cause I’m always in supportive. You should not ever bake in the expectation that exclusive is exclusive forever.
I would rarely ever recommend
that. Yeah. I think that’s a good way to go.
And then with your mailing list, it becomes this kind of thing where you could, if you wanna make something exclusive to your subscription, you now have that one or two years that you make it and then know that rotates out to your mailing list.
So it’s not this either or situation. But definitely timing matters. On day one, you’re not gonna necessarily be able to provide exclusive content for the mailing list, for the subscription and for your free subscribers. Or you could, but then you’d have to write ahead. Which is what you’re doing.
But you’d have to go into it like with that plan.
Gotcha. And then the other side of that question would be arc and beta teams. Because the common promise Yeah. Yeah. For indies especially is you get this free ebook copy, maybe physical copy. You have a huge audience out there and you know you have people to send it to you get that for free or, but the exchanges like you’re having to provide a review, possibly provide feedback.
Yeah. Yeah. If you’re doing that with, if you’re doing early access and people are paying for that, then some of them might think yes. Okay, why don’t I just, wait till most of it’s out and then join the I Yeah, I wanna be on your beta team. I wanna be on your ARC team. And Yeah, I can give a little feedback.
I’m maybe was gonna give that anyways on, on the subscription platform.
It’s tricky. Cuz there’s a lot of authors, what they’ll do for their subscription is not have an ARCA beta team. If you’re like I’m using this language, like just to try and paint a picture. If you’re a, maybe a subscription first author or a native subscription author, that’s not the right way to frame it. But the idea is that’s what you started your business in or what you’re centering or publishing business on. A lot of those authors, including, Amelia Rose doesn’t really have an a beta arc team. So she’s essentially her beta readers are the people getting early access to her first drafts.
And then the benefit is they get to read it before everyone else. She gets that beta reader feedback anyways. Yeah. So it all parties win, but there’s two scenarios where this doesn. Hold up one if you want to have a beta arc team, which you have the right as an author to have that, and then two, if you already have one, so you know.
Yeah, exactly. Those are the two things where yeah, if you’re just starting and listening you could take that approach. Now if you have a beta arc team, I think there’s a few things you could do here. So the first thing is, if you’re doing your model in terms of pre-writing, and this is hard and requires a lot of planning by the way, and I don’t think it’s best for all others, but if you’re doing like the level of planning you already are you could then go even a step further and like I said, I don’t recommend this for everyone, but go a step further and say, I’m actually gonna basically like already have to a degree edited this book. By the time it, it gets to my early access subscribers and the beta and the ARC team basically get it before that and you’re making changes, base their feedback to then give the early access subscribers at different and hopefully better version so that then the people who are paying for it still are paying for early access, but they’re paying for a version that’s already gone through the beta arc team.
Okay. So that’s one option. Obviously. What that does is two things. One, it makes it possible to have a beta arc team, but the downside is your development timeline from like ideation to product release Yeah. Increases. So your actual time to actually go from time as a writer spent writing to inflow of cash also increases.
Yeah. Not always. Maybe a great
move to the business. Yeah. That’s definitely not for everybody. That is 100% for me because this Good, this is my fourth book that’s coming out. It will be out, I think by the time this airs, cuz we’re in April, comes out in week from Tuesday. Cool, cool. This was edited, like complete edited last June, so Okay.
This
is for you. This is, that’s great. I’m very, that, that’s what I recommend. But for other authors who are listening and being like, yeah, like the two things you mentioned, I think there’s a middle ground. And let me tell you that I think this is, it’s a little bit harder to pull off, but it’s not impossible, which is you could, and I’ve had authors ask me this all the time at Ream, and this is something that we will be coming out over the summer because you’ve asked and we shall deliver.
But basically the ability to comp beta readers, ARC readers anterior subscription. So they’re one of your, basically they’re just in the subscription. Yeah. Already. And in part of that, they will offer your beta and creator feedback literally inside of your subscription. And they’re just not paying for it because you’re basically telling them, please offer this, like really in-depth feedback if you like.
Okay. Yeah, I like that. And that’s something that you could then have the CUNY interact in into other readers would be able to see that beta reader’s feedback. And be able to potentially comment on it. So the downside of that, It’s actually like very difficult to do and no subscription platform at the current moment allows that hopefully if you’re listing three or four months from now, we’ve done that at Ream.
But that’s something that, and this current moment isn’t super easy to do within a subscription platform. But the other solution to that, which maybe isn’t as ideal, but does the same thing as if you’re releasing something chapter by chapter, however you’re releasing it to those readers in your subscription, you could effectively comp those readers on that content even though they won’t be inside of your subscription.
Yeah. And give them that book through book funnel, send them that through email, however you wanna do it. Is that hard then as a paying subscriber, realizing that? Yeah it’s a little, it’s a little tricky. And I think that it’s tough to have an open call for both your subscription and for your beta team.
But this is where I recommend taking even a step further, your ARC team and your beta reader team. Cuz I’ve talked to so many authors who have Deadweight beta reader and ARC teams, like they’re not actually doing anything. And you just feel obligated to give these people a free book because they already signed up for it and you wanna fulfill that promise, but they’re deadweight at some point.
How you can like really make them active and then be forward that this is a thing in your subscription is actually give them increased status inside of your community. So your ARC reader team, let’s say it’s 10 people, or your beta reader team, Let’s say also 10 people for simplicity, right? They can get this sort of special like badge special power in your community where they are actually maybe helping you moderate comments where they’re maybe actually helping you spark discussion in your community and actually bringing fans together.
So they become this part kind of community manager slash like just superfan reader. And part of the benefit of doing that work and being able to like communicate with other readers, FOSS, that engagement in your community is getting maybe discounted or free comped access. And how I envision this going when we release the feature is that we’ll comp the access where the author gets to choose, do I give this reader comp access to a specific tier for a lifetime?
Do I give this specific reader comp access for 90 days, 180 days? I think it’s also useful too because a lot of times I know authors will put a reader on their beta and arc team who might not actually be giving reviews but it’s still a great reader because they might not have the finances to actually even buy their books. Yeah. And in today’s eight day and age all, if you’re in Kennel Unlimited, you aren’t gonna be in a library. So Yeah. Which is sad that, that’s how that program works cuz libraries are a great way to get books. But you know what do you say to a reader in that position, right?
Who wants to read your book? You wanna make it accessible. I think that’s where, a lot of authors have bundled that into our beta reader teams. And that’s where this sort of comping in your subs. Can be useful. Like I said, I think it’s a tougher line to walk. But I definitely would recommend taking that approach based on your individual circumstance because everyone has a different relationship with
that.
Yeah, and I think that idea of which touches on one of my later questions having them having your beta or art team be in your subscription as like a dedicated engagement encourager.
Yes, that’s a good
way to think about it like that. That’s a very good way to think about just having I would gladly have someone subscribe to my Paton or in, in the future my ream and 100% comp them if they go in and they’re the ones giving me feedback, sparking discussion so that not only do I have that from them, but I have that from the other people who wanna be involved and see this person.
And that’s worth so much more than, the $5 $10 a month that I would just be getting from them. Cuz that goes a very long
way. I agree. And that’s actually when you were asking about how do I increase engagement in my subscription? That’s, I think it’s a tricky thing because yeah, if you’re as an author trying to build community with your readers and it’s definitely something that like we talk a lot about and I love talking about it, but at the same time, I.
There’s a nuance that sometimes we miss in our advice and it’s certainly that I think is, it’s tough to even share because it’s just oh, build your community. It’s important. But there’s a message underneath that sometimes that can get lost or hard to really understand, which is that doesn’t mean you’re like best friends with your readers all the time.
Yeah. Some authors will be. But that’s not true for every author. For instance, for you like your sci-fi fantasy pen name. Odds are you’re gonna be way more into the world building. You might not want to build personal relationships with your readers, but they’re gonna build a CUNY around your world.
Yeah. The fandom of the lore. So in, in your instance, and this does get personalized cuz the general device is general, but if I was to give certificate instance to you on your fantasy and sci-fi pen for the world building aspects, cause that’ll be world building driven, I would recommend literally almost encouraging community managers to create like fan lore, engage with almost creating your own fan wiki.
That’s what’s gonna be like these readers will love the most. It’s just getting lost in the fandom. But at the end of the day, you are the guy who’s creating the next chapter. You’re creating the next kind of canon. Yeah. You’re the canon of the world who’s extending it further and is able to continue delivering them more awesome stories.
Now there is like valuable engagement that you sh should and can do. If a fan is commenting you, DMing you, it could be great to tell them thanks. Great to answer questions about the world playing that speculation. But at the end of the day, You can’t farm excitement from people. You have to create that, and you’re more likely to create excitement by just creating more awesome immersive worlds in your instance.
Rather than like trying to engage with your readers and be like, how’s your day going? What are you doing next? That would not be my advice to you specifically, which means that then these community manager, arc reader, beta team, label it whatever you’d like, those people actually can be valuable in assisting that because their whole goal is how do I make basically round out the edges to this world even more.
Yeah. That you’re inviting them to think about in it with you. Now that’s specific to world building based authors. They’ll be a lot of authors listening who might be more like relationship personality based in that case, like your engagement strategy might look different. You might actually want to share posts from your personal life.
You might wanna be like, how are you doing? How are my readers going? Being able to build that sort of parasocial relationship between you as the author and the reader. That could be really effective. But I would guess that not every author listing falls into that camp. There’s probably quite a few that fall into your camp as well, so that’s how I’d recommend for you.
Yeah.
And I do have both because on my pen name, that is romance, that is different pen name. Primarily relationship driven. And I have noticed that like I, when I. Started this up and I think I listened to a specific episode that you and Amelia did on encouraging engagement.
I went through Amelia’s stories on Webpa and looked at all her author notes and tried to just find the common thread. And those do a good amount of heavy lifting for, one or two sentences. Yeah. After your chapter. I’ve noticed that they do more within, for me at least, they do more within my subscription than they do just and on Reddit than they do on one padd.
Interesting. Which, that’s something that I still need to get used to, cuz like I have, I think my posts on average on Reddit get like 30 up votes. And I have, that’s decent. And I have a community though of has seven to 800 subscribers to the specific subreddit. Amazing. Whereas on what pad, there’re hundreds of views per post.
Maybe not as many. I think it’s votes on what pad. Yeah. Yeah. But like on Reddit, I probably don’t have anywhere near the views on what pad that I do. So that’s But more engagement, but yeah. But more engagement. And the one that I wanted to actually bring up for, I’m gonna test this out with my sci-fi and fantasy patent as well with my own.
But something that’s been getting a lot of traction for me lately that I have found a few subscribers from on my Patreon is posting on the Literotica website. Oh yeah. Yeah. That it is, that makes sense. It’s actually a very great website for interacting with readers. I get a lot, I get at least four or five comments per chapter on that.
And I think a few of that’s great. Them have 10,000 views on there. Whoa, that’s awesome. And I only started posting maybe in February. Wow. Yeah.
That seems like a blue ocean. Yeah,
people That’s wild. And they do have, non-erotic category on there and it’s full of a lot of stories. So honestly that could be a good place to go for, even if you are not in a steamier genre, like I’m definitely gonna try that out, see how it works, see if I can get a good yeah.
Kind of metric for how many people come there. But cuz that apparently is very I think, untapped for subscription authors. Like I see some on there doing it, but I don’t think it necessarily has meshed with the indie world as much as far as people who are trying to make this a business versus people who are like, oh, I’m writing this fun story on here and maybe support me.
I will say if you do go on that the posting is not. Like the actual posting mechanism. I think it’s about 48 hours until your post goes live. Interesting. Okay. And it’s a little bit clunky. You have to do a little bit of HTML for the italics and bold formatting and stuff like that. But I, I think where I was going with that is I think posting on different platforms can give you a good sense of where you want to go for engagement and where you’re gonna get your readers from.
Which is something that I’m rapidly learning on that platform that I did not at all expect.
That’s I think, a really interesting point, cuz another thing that not only do I think everyone has the same question, which is, where do you actually find readers? How should you, yeah. And obviously directing them too, cuz this goes back into a conversation that we’re gonna get into between, are you gonna direct them to your subscription, your mailing list, your’re direct store, all these different places we have as an author where do you wanna direct them?
Yeah. But when it comes to actually finding them I think you mentioned something really important, which is bad experimentation. Cuz a lot of times we as authors, might try that one thing and then see that one thing doesn’t work and then just assume that our story’s bad or that Yeah, it’s our fault essentially, and that we should just, go back to the drawing board.
And not. Sometimes that is true. Yeah.
And I, but a lot of times it doesn’t. I’ve struggled a lot with that with TikTok. Yeah. I get absolutely like no results from TikTok. And I had I think a point where I was putting out at least two or three videos a day. Oh, wow. Doing the page flips. They would never get over 300.
Like they, I got two that got like 400 views and maybe one or two that got like a thousand. But I think that, and that, that did make me go, okay did I do the wrong cover and something wrong? And second guess everything. Yeah. And Facebook ads too, because okay, these Facebook ads, they’re getting, really good cost per click.
They’re getting shown to destructive.
I know
that feeling. Yeah. They’re getting shown to a lot of people and zero sales. Yeah. The conversion’s not there. Yeah. Yeah. And like for me, I know at least I did have not a good blurb. Okay. It was not good. But I refined that still nothing. And so then you go, okay, is my cover on point?
Is my cover doing what I want it to? Is, is maybe my sample not good? Is there a formatting error? Are there, not enough reviews? And I think the thing that I needed to tell myself is I thankfully have some friends who are like, they are my best friends. They will tell me when I am writing a piece of hot garbage, but they will also tell me when no stop.
Second guessing yourself, you’re being stupid. This is good. You are just not, maybe not hitting the right audience. Yeah. You’re just not hitting the right audience yet. And I think one thing we need to remember, which is a good thing about subscriptions is reviews I think are a lot more powerful than we often think they are.
Like we think we can just go ha have a promotion service that gets us a lot of downloads and maybe boost us in the ranking a little bit or have some good Facebook ads or Yeah. Go on TikTok. But I think as I’ve noticed, like when I’m reading indie authors, cause I’m trying to read a bit more to see what’s out there so I can recommend other indies.
I want a hundred percent look how many reviews does this have? How are these reviews? Cuz I want to see this as a book. Is this worth my time reading? Because that’s not only books that I’m not spending reading. Reading other books that have been highly recommended to me. Yeah. That’s also time I’m not spending writing.
It’s a
big investment. Yeah. For anyone too, like whether you’re a writer or not, like we all have a million things we could be doing in our lives. A million books plus that we could literally be reading. I think you mentioned something really interesting on like the reflective point that I think is really hard cuz I’ve faced this myself where something is not.
And you immediately go, okay, it’s this discovery method’s still valid, let’s say TikTok, Facebook ads. But it’s my product that’s wrong. So you keep making these little tweaks and you can drive yourself insane because almost never do those little tweaks actually make the difference.
I think about this, cuz now being in the world of building a startup, all the little things that you could tweak on your own website are like unbelievable. You could go into like when you have the code, like we could change like a million different things with ream to try and make every little thing work.
And this is why you have a lot of people say AB testing, AB test that ab test this. And I’ve increasingly, and I’ve seen a movement towards this broadly, but just increasingly, I’m like, not that AB tests aren invaluable, but especially when you’re starting, like you need things to move the needle.
We’re not talking like a little 10 or 20% improvement. Yeah. You need a thousand percent improvement to survive. As an author with 10 subscribers making $50 a month, maybe not a thousand percent improvement actually No. Literally you would need a thousand improvement to, yeah. That’s crazy, right?
That’s what you need. So trying to sit there and tweak and get 20% here, 10% here, you have to think about it like, if I make my subscription or if I make my description like 30% better on my book page, am I gonna convert 10 to 20 times more people? Cause that’s what I need. And the answer a lot of times when you’re seeing zero conversion, maybe not now, that doesn’t mean if you like, like you were suggesting, if it’s really like a heaping pile of garbage and you do need to be reflected about something like this, then maybe that is the real problem.
But I’ve seen even signs of conversion when there’s something there. It might not be refined yet. You might be able to do so much better, but you’ll at least see something if you’re really seeing something, just feel like it’s not working. A lot of times that just means your story isn’t in front of the right audience yet.
And how I think about this is where can you actually easily target an audience? And I think about that before I’d even sit down and write the book. Like before you even open page one, before you even get the idea of get the cover, think about who am I writing for and where can I actually easily reach them?
Because yeah, if you’re trying to reach a group of readers that you can’t reach then you’re setting yourself up for failure. And if you don’t know what group of readers you’re trying to reach, then you’re going to be developing a product that you’re just sitting there and trying to figure out what the actual person is that this is actually going to solve their entertainment problem.
And you have to do a process of like reader development, searching for what are existing comp titles that I might wanna write something similar to. Yep. Where are those titles succeeding and where are those readers hanging out? And you have to reverse engineer that process and go.
There. What are these three or four books that have been successful? What can I do to create a book that is similar but just different enough to be better in many respects? To hit that same audience. That is like the most engineered way to like the word right to market’s used a lot, but oftentimes I think we conflate right to market with going to Amazon, checking the categories, seeing the top rankings, and limiting our market to that view.
And I encourage people to write to community and status, especially if you have a subscription write to maybe even existing relationships you already have. If you’re active in a Facebook group that has a bunch of readers in it, then try and write that next book for them and DM a few of the readers.
Yeah. That you might already know. That’s kinda the way to reverse engineer it. But when it comes to where to find readers, I think oftentimes you only need one like acquisition channel to actually work. Yeah. I mean like someone like Mark Dawson, I think he’s great. Mean Facebook ads, he talks a lot about, just talked about.
His podcast with the Self-publishing show, yeah, he’s done well with Amazon ads. He’s tried little things here and there, but really Facebook ads are what made his career. That was it. Is Facebook ads gonna make everyone’s career? No and nothing. No slide on him. No slide on anyone that doesn’t work for, or people who it works for.
There’s different strategies and methods for everyone, but you just have to find that one way, like you’re saying Lit is working for you, that might not be I don’t know where that website at. That might not be a huge enough market to penetrate yet. Yeah. To actually grow to the size you want.
But it might one day be, so do you wanna go all in on Literotica? Do you wanna see that? But until you get there, I think your strategy of testing as many places as possible in the beginning is key. What are like the little hooks that you can throw out into all these different places to test if there’s something there, if there’s something there.
And also if you like it, because even if you have one TikTok that you do well, if you hate TikTok, you’re not gonna be happy doing that. Yeah. Just period. Like you
shouldn’t do that. Yeah. And I’ve and I mean the strategy that I’m doing, which I would recommend as far as experimentation is I first did Webpa after Reddit, cuz that was where I found my initial subscriber base.
Webpa. I think Amelia gives some advice on one of the podcasts, follow her advice. She probably has it much more thorough. But basically don’t just post a chunk of your chapters because you are trying to build a serial audience. Yeah. So you do want to try and come up with a good interval for posting that maybe you start out one a day if you have a full complete story that you just want to get out there.
That’s what I’m doing with Literotica. Maybe post twice a week. Go at your own schedule. That’s what whatever’s comfort. If you do have a complete story, that’s a really good way to test with, because then you hopefully have seen at some point, yeah, like this is a good story. People like it when they get to the end.
People want to go on to other free story. I have my subscription, whatever it is. They would go on to other on that. But I would recommend do that one at a time so you can have some very clear metrics. Don’t, cause I think there’s archive of our own, there’s ink, there’s, oh, there’s so many sites.
This Royal road don’t go at least a dozen plus repeatable ones. Yeah. Don’t go. I’m going to, post one chapter on every one of these sites every Sunday. You have no idea what’s converting. Yeah. You’ll have no idea where people are coming from. You can maybe ask them down the line, but like that means that it’ll be so much more effort for you by the time you get to that complete story.
Even if it’s only like 20 chapters and you go through that in 20 days before you find out this platform does work. That
takes this platform, doesn’t work, takes that takes patience, takes.
That’s the hardest part. But that’s what, that’s the game that we’re in with Yeah. With subscriptions.
Yeah. Where I am, like the re part of the reason that I gravitated towards this is because I am in the, I hope I can write all the stories I want to write before I die. Mindset. I need to make sure I live long enough to write all these stories. I’m not in the. I wanna write two books and make a lot of money from that, and then just be able to do whatever I want with my life.
No, I, yeah.
That’s just like incredible advice. And I think that may maybe other people have highlighted some things like that, but that was a unique and great take. And I think that you’ve had a unique way of being disciplined in that manner. Because a lot of times, even if we like say we feel the way that you do, which I know you feel that way, I feel that way at my core. We still have this kind of side that’s pulling us towards this sort of like instant gratification Yeah. Author success. And you have to constantly look at that and be like, wait, I’m not trying to just make a thousand dollars a month tomorrow, although, like that would be great.
But I’m actually trying to build a system that I can predictably continue making that. And if you don’t, like you said, know where readers are coming from, you’re just basically throwing stuff at the fan. You will have no idea what’s working, what’s not how you should spend your time. Oh yeah.
And it can be unbelievably demoralizing when all those 12 avenues, best case one of them works out, then you have a fun problem to figure out. Whoa. They one of them worked and, I, I don’t really know. I might still be wasting my time, but at least I’m making money. Great for you. If that happens, that still is problematic because you might not know how to scale that correctly. If you don’t find success in those 12 strategies, you now didn’t build on your lessons between those strategies Yeah. To execute the next time better. And you probably feel way worse about yourself than you should because you didn’t, it’s not that you are bad or that your books are bad, you just didn’t give yourself the time to
learn.
Yeah. And you’re gonna have some level of burnout there too. Cause, cause posting is a lot
of work and it’s not like what we sign up for.
Yeah. Not like just posting, not writing, not doing anything like that. Just posting I think I posted I took most of the day to post like 14 chapters that I had already written.
Yeah. Like that. That is, it’s a lot.
Yeah. And it’s the kind of thing that you might feel tired after you write because it’s, an emotional experience or you at least feel satisfied. You don’t feel satisfied after the 14 chapter. It’s
out you made measurable. Like especially if you track your just that’s another way for an organization.
I track the hell out of my writing. Yeah. And not even my writing, but the progress I am making on my outlines and my drafts of each book. I do need to get a little bit better about that cuz I’ve let that part fall off a bit. But I like if you are tracking your progress, One of the kind of dangers of that is when you’re doing stuff that’s just, I’m posting all these chapters, I’m doing this, and you’re not actually writing or editing or anything like that, then you feel like I haven’t made any progress.
Yeah. Because honestly, like you’ve done the necessary admin work, but you haven’t made progress. You’ve just put it out there. And so that’s why if you are going to try experimenting, I do very much recommend do, one a day at the most. Yeah. Don’t try dumping a bunch of chapters on there, because if you do one a day, that’s manageable.
That’s right. You set a 15 minute timer, that’s not a huge chunk of your day, but if you’re trying to do 20 of those, that’s suddenly like three to four hours of your day Yeah. That you’ve done. And you just will be in that mindset where you’re now like, I’m in the pressing buttons mindset.
I’m not in the writing mindset or the creative mindset. And if you made the mistake of doing that before you started writing for the day, then that kind of just impacts an entire day’s worth of progress that you could have made. Writing or reading or researching something. And it, like for me it just throws me like I, I make sure to always do my writing in the morning so that I have nothing else getting me in a different mindset until I finish at least a minimum
amount.
That’s. There, there’s gonna be night riders listening and that’s great. Yeah. But whatever like for you gets you in that zone. You have to keep that time. Time is sacred now. I love that advice and it makes me start thinking about now that you bring those fans in, let’s pretend like this is working, it’s working for you.
Yeah. Now you’re having, I think good, but still a problem of where do I direct them? And specifically I wanna ask you, how are you thinking about kind of these different areas you can funnel fans into with direct sales? You have your subscription, you also have your mailing list. How are you thinking about these three areas in terms of where you’re directing fans?
Yeah. And so that’s I think one of the other questions on there too. But the way that, so the way, as far as subscriptions that I see as the two best ways to direct people there is you have your warm and your cold, basically. Yeah. Warm is your mailing list. I 100% want to grow my mailing list as much as I can.
I still need to go, come up with a good process for kind of, trimming the fat. Cuz How are you growing your mailing list? Primarily through book funnel promos. Okay, cool. Just because that is a relatively low effort, one that I can do right now while I’m focusing more on writing, cuz I need to do that a bit more immediately.
I think I have almost. A thousand people per pen on my mailing list. Good. They’re not necessarily super, super active on there. Like I, when I send out an email, I’ll usually get three or four responses back that’s actually not bad. Yeah. Which isn’t bad, which isn’t bad.
It’s not great, but it’s not bad. Yeah. But so for them, I, on my on my pen name that I currently have my subscription set up, I have my automation and I have, I think my here’s your freebie. Hey, just checking to make sure you got your freebie and whitelist my email. Do you want to read ahead and be an reader for anything?
And then one that’s encouraging reviews. And then my fifth one, which I think they will probably get, I think that’s basically a month out from having gotten my reader magnet and being on my subscription Yeah. Or being on my mailing list. They get, Hey, here’s my subscription. And I’m even thinking of modifying that a bit more because I already have a little lead in at the end of my reader magnet, both to my subscription and the free platforms.
But I think I do want to try, and I may already do it, direct them immediately with that first email to where I post my free. Because I think that is where all of your cold leads should go. If you’re posting on TikTok, if you’re posting on Instagram, Facebook, whatever. I don’t think that pointing people to your Patreon is a good idea.
I think that is going to be a waste of your effort. I think what you want to do is you want to build excitement about your, ideally if you have a free story, I think that if you’re following the subscription model, you can do exclusive. Yeah. It’s worked well for me. Yeah. But I think that’s because I have my free story that’s
getting people already excited about Yes.
You and about Yeah. And
that hooks them into the characters. And so they may not want to read, they may not want to do the early access one. They may want to only do the exclusive ones. Which are about other characters that appear in that story. That smart. That’s really smart. And yeah.
And cuz if you’re directing someone toward something that’s free, that’s so much less friction than anything paid, than anything where you’re signing up. You
have to build that trust too. Yeah. Imagine just going to a random author that you don’t really know yet. You’ve got in one email, probably haven’t even read their freebie yet.
Yeah. And then they’re asking you to pay them three, five, $10 a month.
Yeah. And cause that’s not even, that’s not even paying. That’s also, I, I didn’t really have a Patreon account until a little while ago until I’d seen a ton of people advertising their Patreon and I found like one or two creators that I’d been following.
A, two or three years that I was like, you know what, I do want to support them. I don’t even care about their benefits. I just wanna support them. And because I know I am the worst person ever for social media, like I will be right out with that. Like I was of the opinion, I’m gonna stay off social media as much as possible.
It just sidetracks you from everything you want to get done. When I am on social media, I don’t upvote things. I don’t like things, I don’t comment on things. I have started doing that now because I understand how it helps creators. Yeah. But I just have to think, all right, what would get me to actually go ahead and pay for something?
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s directing people to that free material because there’s no commitment for them there other than a little bit of time, especially with the serial. They’re not reading a whole book. They’re reading something that for all they know could be five chapters, could be just the one chapter and they don’t have any investment in it.
They don’t even have a Kindle Unlimited, like taking up one of their spots Yeah. Of books that they’re renting. They can read as much as of it as they want. If they don’t like it, you didn’t want them going to your Patreon anyways, or your ream anyways. If they stick with it, there is so much higher of a likelihood that they’re just going to get through to some point in your story that is going to convince them they need, I want more of this rather than.
Some line that you came up with that, or some caption or post or funny, jumping on a trend or something like that, that you did in a TikTok or an Instagram reel or Instagram post even, and spent anywhere from 15 to minutes to like an hour going through and making that post posting at the right time of day, engaging with, profiles around that to encourage engagement on your own post.
That’s all extraneous effort. That can be put down to five minutes of, post a quote from the recent chapter that you posted that week, put that up on your Instagram with, a color, a background that relates to your story in some way. And if someone finds that interesting and just in your caption, check out my free story.
If someone finds that interesting, maybe you can put a little bit more effort into that. But they’ll go to that and then that’s where they want, that’s where you want them being. You want them being on that free story, that free platform, that there’s no commitment for them. Cuz that’s what’s gonna determine whether or not they become that fan or even that super fan.
I couldn’t agree more with this. Yeah, I mean it’s exactly what I believe. I think that’s the thing that people so mistake about subscriptions and I get the questions all the time about can I run a Facebook ad to a subscription? I don’t see that being a great idea. Run into your story.
Yeah. Run into your story. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not that you won’t, it’s not that advertising can help you eventually grow your subscription, but as you’re suggesting it’s further down in the reader journey, it’s just something that you need a high degree of trust in order to start paying one monthly. Yeah. And you’re not gonna be able to create that trust in an ad.
People are willing to take a risk on a free story, maybe a one-time ebook purchase, all these sorts of things that oh, that sounds good. I’ll just try it out. Yeah. That’s not the subscription buying process. You don’t go, oh, that sounds good. I’ll just start paying them $5 a month.
That’s, it’s not an impulse type of thing. So it’s further down. And you’re talking about direct sales. And I’m curious, viewing kind of direct sales, let’s say like on your own website selling ebook. Selling merch, selling sign books, selling anything versus a subscription. How do you view those
kind of?
So I think that direct sales is definitely something that I want to get to at some point. I don’t think I’m ready for it yet, cuz I don’t think I have, I think direct sales is for people who can from what I’ve seen, bundles if you can offer any sort of bundle, whether it’s multiple stories paperback, ebook, audiobook, or even probably just paperback or physical, and ebook like that is when you want to be able to start going towards direct.
I haven’t looked up into how much having, Shopify and everything like that is that’s on my to-do list. But that is something that I want to do at some point. Like I want to fully create Disneyland for my subscribers. Love it. I love it for my audience. But I think that especially with the way that Amazon’s platforms have restrictions around them and subscription platforms don’t as much.
I think direct selling and subscriptions go hand in hand. Yeah, they do. Because you can go ahead and you can you’re not necessarily hurting yourself by throwing your book up on, drafted digital print, drafted digital, all the websites that they go to on Amazon, as long as you’re not in Kindle Unlimited.
Because then you can have your subscription beforehand and you don’t necessarily have to take it down after you’re complete with that book and you launch it either on your website or on one of the other platforms. I think honestly for this there may be better examples, but like Brandon Sanderson Yeah.
Is a fantastic example of this because with his year of Sanderson thing, he’s effectively be going, all right, I got all these people who like, it is essentially it’s not a full like subscription as much as we’re thinking of it, but. It’s, they basically did like a big one time I’m purchasing the year subscription.
Yeah. From him. And so he’s going, yeah, you guys basically all got
early access to four books in all the formats
And then to all the boxes as well. Yeah, because he’s going ahead and direct selling. I don’t know if he’s doing the full boxes, but he is doing a lot of the merch from the boxes.
He says, once my subscribers get this, once the people who paid up front for this get it, you can order it off my website. And yeah, he’d be shooting himself in the foot if he didn’t do that. Because everybody, like myself, who subscribed to the Year of Sanderson is they’re going on TikTok, on YouTube, on whatever, posting about not just the books, not just the actual content of the books, but the presentation of the books.
What you get in the book boxes and like the fun that they’re having with those. And people are like, I saw someone doesn’t have a backpack to put the pins on that he’s giving out. So he’s 3D printed basically like a clock with the cosme symbol on it. No way. And is putting all the pins on those.
That’s beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. And so because of that, he’s now getting people who are basically in his Facebook group, but maybe weren’t on his subscription platform to go, Hey, you should go buy this after the fact because it’s. And look at all this cool stuff we’re getting. And the only for me, the only issue that I see with that as indies specifically, and this may change, I don’t think it’s the technology is there yet.
But audio, because what I have been working on, and actually the thing that I was gonna open up my ream under my name was was early access audio. Got it. Where I already have my books out and I was going to start doing in a chapter a week with audio and then make a tier where basically I have like author commentary at the end.
Yeah. So you can get that as well, because a lot of people do that if Oh yeah. Like again, with subscriptions, you’re not looking for the I want to appeal to everybody. You’re looking for the people who are going to see something that has your name on it and click by no matter what, because they’re like, I absolutely love everything this author puts out.
Even if I, even if this is a four star for me instead of a five star, like I think all their other stuff is I want to support them, I want to take part in it. People like that are gonna love if you do like an annotated version of your book or if you do audio commentary. Totally. That’s probably the easier way to do it.
Yeah. As far as, especially if you wanted to try and do something physic. But then the only issue with that for me is that delay that makes, if I’m doing it the way I am doing it, where the ebook and physical book is already out, that delays the direct selling bundle a little bit. So if I ever do get to the point where I’m having, like a, I’m not launching on Amazon, I’m not launching on Barnes and Noble or Cobo or whatever I’m launching on my website and I’m launching with my direct selling bundles that I’m giving out.
I can’t necessarily do the full bundle that I think would appeal to a lot of people, and I think is a big hook of direct selling, which is physical ebook audio, or just audio somewhere in there with that bundle at the time of launch.
That’s because your production would be almost staggered in a sense because you can do
audio.
Yeah, because I, cuz the way that I had it planned out before I realized, oh, this is a fantastic way to do things as far as direct selling and bundling was basically I was thinking publish the e-book or do the early access e-book up until the e-book and the physical book release and then start doing audio for that.
Yeah. And you know what? That may vary. That may be just a, some people it works better if you just launch in direct sell with the bundle. Some people, your readers may want to. All right. Hey, I read this book and now I wanna listen to it. Yeah. And I think that’s again, experimentation. That’s very high investment, ex experimentation, but it’s experimentation that I think you’ve just gotta do, gotta figure out not only what works for you, but what works for your readers.
What’s
interesting when you say high investment, it’s true, it’s high investment, but your readers can actually help fund that because if you start the audio tier that they then start to subscribe to you before you actually release the bundle. You’re able to have already made money from that product that’ll be in the bundle.
That’s where I think, cuz we were talking about subscriptions, direct sales and like how to think about I really like how you’re thinking about it and it’s not an either or scenario. It’s definitely both. And subscriptions are the, for the super fans, it’s not only for getting those things early access, but it’s also for the convenience of not, they already know they want to keep buying from you, so they literally don’t even have to decide to buy from you again.
Yeah. Like it’s just automatic, which for someone who like already loves your work, it’s just so much less of a headache. They just can get it sent to them when it’s ready, when you make that promise. And then the other thing obviously with the subscription is it’s like the ultimate bundle cuz you’re not only bundling the actual, like content itself potentially is like you tier.
Tiers go higher or you benefit stack, but you’re bundling the cuny the connection to you, the connection to your fellow readers, all of it in one place that you’re getting like the v i p access for. So it’s really like thinking about a concert and thinking about the people who are at the front row in the pit, like that v i P experience.
People are paying for that, but then eventually, you release the cd, all that other stuff. And I think for authors, Lynn, launching what you’re doing outside of your subscription onto your site makes an awful lot of sense. And yeah, Sanderson’s probably the most advanced in the world at it by far.
Yeah. But I think trying to decode what Sanderson’s doing it with the audio in particular it is tricky in the current stage because it’s relatively easy to produce an ebook and then a paperback book. Yeah. In concurrence, but audio takes later. One thing to remember though is that if you’re selling direct, you don’t have the review process of audible or people of so that cuts down on that time. Yes. So then it really is just trying to translate what you’re doing to an early access release. And I think I have two or three ideas here. So one is that if you’re working with a narrator who is flexible and actually willing to like do. These draft chapters with you, that could be one option. That’s probably the worst idea cuz it’s the most expensive. Yeah. Cuz you’re gonna have ’em probably do it again if you make changes. The second version is probably what you’re best suited for, which is, and again, this now increases your product development time line even more. But this is essentially what Sanderson did.
He wrote those books all ahead of time. He got that audio produced like right around then. Yeah. And then, 2021 is the year that you actually launched and get the paid for that subscription. You’ve already developed the product. 2023 is when you actually, or 2022. 2023 is when you start rolling it out.
And then, you have 20, 24 is 2023 like the next year when it’s gonna go to the public. It’s getting complicated with the years, but I think that strategy’s interesting if you’re willing to make that more upfront investment. The key in that is that you don’t necessarily have to do it all out of pocket because your subscribers can literally start to fund that from day one.
If you’re making two payments to a narrator upon completion and maybe one at the start, if you’re able to get your fans to sign up first month, you now have that money to go and take and pay that narrator. There might not be a ton out of pocket if you do the cash flow. But the third option, and I think is what you’re alluding to with technology is obviously utilizing some sort of. Auto narrated Yeah. Type of thing that can even potentially narrate your first drafts and then you could even have a human narrator go and do the final draft for publication. But how do you do early access audio? Yeah. And actually
I, I like that a lot cuz I was gonna say, like I’ve tested out both the auto narrator with, the stock voices with, it’s not incredible yet.
No. With making a cop with voice cloning. Yeah. I was actually doing an accent for one of those versus my own voice to see how each of the one, the accent one was less computerized, which was really enough. So I like the, they’re weird still. Like I, but I wasn’t satisfied with any of those, but I do that point that make the point that they’re draft chapters.
Yeah. And so to your subscription, you’re saying you get these on au you get these audio chapters before anyone else, and then maybe make a perk you just, you’ve already paid for all this, you get the audio book for free once you have an actual
human narrator. Yes, exactly. Yeah. I think because there’s two kinds of audio reader.
And I appreciate really great audio, but from like a utility perspective, I have more ear time than I have eye time in my day. So I’m going to just more conveniently and more, more able to consume content that’s audio based. So a lot of times, there might be even a long essay that I’ll just do speech and texts with, which sounds horrific.
It’s not good, but I’m still consuming it. And that’s ultimately what I want to consume the story. I experience
it. I didn’t even think you were going from that perspective, cuz I like That’s a great point. But I was gonna say my, one of my best friends and my mom are both dyslexic and Yeah.
Fantasy and sci-fi of course just exacerbate that like beyond belief. And so for them, like that’s how the, how they’re most likely to read my book and that’s where they can read it and enjoy it because I like my friend, she was like, I tried reading your book because there are different names and stuff, even if you’ve told me how to pronounce them.
Throw it throws you outta the reading experience. Yeah. It throws me out of it and it makes it more effort and I don’t want to associate that with your books with pleasure. Yeah. Yeah. It’s supposed to be a pleasure. Yeah. You’re supposed to be reading for fun and she’s and I’m excited to experience your story.
Let me know when you have it out in audiobook. And I’ll probably listen to it in
two days. And that’s also like for people who don’t know how P. Dyslexia is, it is estimated between 10 to 12% of people have dyslexia. Yeah. So very common. And obviously everyone has different kind of severities, different ways that they’re able to cope with it in different reading abilities as well. But the bottom line is that there’s a lot of people Yeah. That fall into that camp. So I think that’s right. And then having the professional, produce audio later does two things. One, for the people who like really don’t want the auto narrated stuff up front.
They don’t have to listen to that. Yeah. But if you really want the early access, you’re getting two different kinds of experiences. It’s like the person reading the first draft story versus getting the final published version. And because you’re using an auto narration, I think it does seem fair that you would then give them that final audio book when it’s done.
They could, send it to them for free as kind of part of it. And I would feel like that’s fair as a reader. And for you as an author, You’re having to produce the audiobook when it’s ready and have now made a bunch of money from all these months on the auto narrated subscription Yeah. To fund that.
So that, that would be my advice on doing that. And then of course, you could then take that final version. The benefit of being the early access was that you got the auto diversion. No one else will see that. Again. That was the first draft, early access version. Thank you for being a subscriber.
Thank you for supporting me. And you get access to it, potentially like months, if not even a year starting at least on chapter one before others. And then when it’s out, you can sell directly that audiobook. And now you already have the new ordinary diversion and the subscription, just the system keeps going
and going.
And since something that I thought of since we were talking about Sanderson, this wouldn’t, obviously wouldn’t be for everybody. But he, I think with each quarter, something like that. Or like when he was talking about the secret projects, he did a reading of the first few chapters.
Yeah. You could do that as well. Auto narrat. So you could just do Yeah. Instead of auto narrating. Because I know for me, reading out loud really does help me catch lot of people, not even the errors, but just like the, this sentence could be written better. Yeah. So like you could just go through that and you’re doing, you’re both producing a product that also I think feels a little bit more intimate to your readers.
Yeah. Whether it’s you reading them a.
And then that’s really cool. Yeah. Then if you wanna take the time that yeah, exactly. And
then you can just pause it and be like, I messed up there. Or I need to rewrite the
sentence and I’m gonna re-edit that. Actually, I will recommend a software that I recommend everyone use.
If you’re gonna take this approach editing audio, use a software, it’s called script. And you could basically plug in all the hours that you do and edit your audio like a Word doc. So it’s like crazy. So you could control F, take out the spaces. Take out the ums. Oh, I need that. So if you’re like reading, obviously 30,000 cha words in a day, you’re gonna sit down for two or three hours and do that.
One, you’re gonna be exhausted, but two, you’re gonna be like, oh, I’m gonna have to edit this for 10 hours and audio ending, it’s the worst. And it is true, all those different things. But in reality, control F can take out all the spaces, can take out all the weird parts, and then as long as you remember some sentences you want to take out.
Since this is your first draft, feasibly, I’m being honest here, cause I’m all about saving time, you could probably edit three hours of audio in 30 minutes, maybe even 20 minutes if you are willing to trust that the computer found all the mistakes. Which I can tell you cuz I’ve edited probably 50 hours using the software, the undoubtedly fig finds all the filler words, finds all of the ums, all of that.
It’s crazy. So I’m definitely looking into that. If you do that, then you know, the editing’s kind of process becomes, do you want to re-listen to your whole thing? Do you wanna re-listen to the whole audio version? You might want to do that because one that’s helpful. To write a better draft. And then two, it might ensure it’s a good experience for the readers, but you also might not want to do that.
And honestly, it’s probably gonna come out 90, 95, if not 98% really great. And it would obviously save you all those hours, which is huge. And you could also, if you wanna speed up the listing back listen to it at a two or three X playback, two x is probably what I’d recommend. Three X is a lot.
You could save like hours and hours of time doing this. And then if you wanna one day have a contractor who does this for you, just tell them to use this software because now you’re gonna save them time. And that’s what we do with this podcast. Now, actually, like we hire someone they spent several hours editing each podcast, but they have the time to like actually think about the cogency of it.
Think about is this coherent? Is this working well? Rather than like making a hundred different cuts for the ums and the spaces. Yeah, it’s incredible. So no, there’s a lot of crazy stuff to do now. Yeah. I’m a big fan of that. So I think there’s a lot of different approaches to, the audio and being able to create that bundle. And like you said, I think you, you mentioned about experimentation and being able to give subscribers more of the content they want, but being able to do that and not hype something up that’s really coming a year later type of deal. Yeah. You don’t wanna be like, Hey, I know you all are interested, I’m working on it.
It’s gonna take a year. That feels like a long development timeline. It definitely depends on kind of your genre. But my general advice is to, for your subscribers, reward them. If you wanna take this approach of experimenting and iterating with your subscribers, which is a genius approach, create short bite size pieces of content that fulfill that desire that may or may not one day lead into something bigger.
Meaning, okay, yes. If they’re telling you we want, this is your next book. They understand you’re not gonna materialize a book out of thin air. Yeah, that’s coming up in the timeline. I gotta finish this series, everyone. That one’s coming after that next series, so gimme some time. But if your fans are like, we really wanna see more of this character, we wanna really wanna see more this scene, we really wanna see this type of maybe more insight into this area of the world.
Maybe a world building map. I think this is where bonus content can be really healthy in a subscription. I don’t recommend authors just coming out here and like firing out the bonus content can, without having your fans explicitly tell you I’m interested in this. And for erotic romance, penny, for instance, for senior romance, it’s great to have those steamy one shots.
Those do really well. Yeah. So if fan’s like interested in more of something, you can just turn around, pump out a thousand words, steamy one shot that they just get in the description. You could, like I said, repurpose that a year or two later elsewhere. But you’re now being able to test things like test is this, did this concept work?
Do they like this character more? Maybe that’s my next. Likewise when it comes to, especially like we’re talking about bundling with like book boxes in direct selling eventually. Yeah. If you think about the ultimate end goal of a year and a half from now, I have this book box that’s sitting on my website that just becomes a product now that I can sell. I’ve essentially productized the experience, my subscribers. Then you can think about testing that experience subscribers every month they might get a little thing in the mail. They might get a digital wallpaper, a digital map, and you’re just testing to see which ones are they responding to most.
Make it low cost, make it something that’s profitable each month. But then you now are testing this sort of thing that gets to go in that book box later. That gets to be a product that other people can buy and maybe those subscribers end up getting some of the failed experiments. Yeah. That might not go well, but that’s actually a benefit for them because now they got something that wasn’t super well received.
You don’t wanna put it out in a product later. Yeah. But they’re the only ones that ever have that. It’s like that exclusive drop.
Yeah. Essentially. And you gave them something a little extra. Yeah. And now it is exclusive. It is, yeah.
And that is no, it really is exclusive. So your experiments like can’t go wrong in that sense.
Yeah. Because like at, if it, as long as you make it profitable for yourself in the moment, in the month over month revenue, you look and go, okay, I’m spending, 10% of my subscription revenue on this experiment. So worst comes to worst, this is my investment in seeing future revenue growth.
If I can figure out another product that works, make my fans happier, make them stick around longer. And as long as you keep your downside very limited. That, and in terms of time as well, if you’re investing in a bonus content, don’t like make every throw away your latest book to develop bonus content.
Yeah. Here and there. That’s how I think I would do it. And then you could use polls and other feedback mechanisms to actually get fan feedback on what those next things should be. Cuz the odds are that both you and the fans will have more ideas than you can execute. Now you might not wanna listen to your fans to a t but it’s very useful to know, ooh, they’re saying they really like this one.
Maybe I should, try out this short story next. Or maybe I should make this map. Or maybe I should try and get this sort of character art and send them a print. I’m throwing out like too many examples almost. But yeah, I think that’s like an idea of how I’d approach it. Yeah.
And that’s something that I think that was, I don’t know if it was explicitly one of the questions that I had, but I think it was something that was, I maybe put under it as a subnote was.
I think it’s kind, I think we, with subscription authors, we have a pretty good idea of how to do fiction. Yeah. We have a pretty good idea of how to do non-fiction. At least if you, I think if you kinda look at YouTube, I think that’s usually the best place to do it. Yeah. Cause that’s literally just.
You’re making something that is either helpful or is just entertaining, but not fiction. And like you can just look at a ton of successful YouTubers if, see if they have a Patreon. Like they, they know how to do that. Yeah. They will know how to do that Way better than I will be able to explain. But then you have that, that bonus content, which kind of straddles the line between the two of them.
It does. Which I don’t know how much this would go to like romance. It might go more towards like thriller or mystery or even historical fiction. But I think it’s gonna be mainly like sci-fi fantasy is if you wanna do that bonus content on a larger scale, like how George R.
Martin did his world of ice and fire. Yeah. Yeah. Like that I would not like, though it has some snippets of fiction in there, I wouldn’t necessarily call that fiction. Yeah, I would. That’s more of a fictionalized, non-fiction essentially. Cause and that’s his bonus content where that’s like something that you’re not gonna buy if you’re not a super fan.
But I think you’re also highlighting something which is smart bonus content. If it’s. Dig digitally based, if it’s story content based could be repurposed for discovery on different platforms. Yeah. And I think every John would have a different type of thing, but essentially as, when it comes to things like sci-fi and fantasy or historical fiction, like you were mentioning, you could imagine bonus content and historical fiction related to a deep diver research into your world.
And that same research article could basically be like literally used for early access bonus content in your subscription. And like I suggest with all content, your subscription, don’t just limit it to it. You could then repurpose that for being a videos essay on YouTube. You could repurpose that for being a blog post that goes in your website, a blog post that you try and get out into maybe having a thread on Twitter or whatever platform exists that does short form content. By the time you listen to this, we’ll have to see where Twitter goes. Then you could have the thread, and do all these sorts of things. And I’ve definitely seen more and more fiction authors either partner with creators who are doing this for advertising purposes or literally going and doing this themselves because there’s so many eyeballs on those platforms.
The, I guess the one downside to it is it’s. You don’t know if everyone’s a reader on those platforms. Yeah. And when you’re creating that kind of bonus content, you might capture people who are really interested in the bonus content, but want it in that medium and don’t actually want to go and read your books, which is where you might wanna then create more bookish bonus content, which would be book reviews.
Yeah. All these other things that like, if you’re creating bonus content that’s related to book reviews or maybe niche movie reviews that like really probably are gonna hit readers anyways. Yeah. Like very rarely are people outside of that genre going to read it. And that’s someone like Daniel Green on YouTube.
He’s like super big in fantasy. Yeah. So he also published a book and it’s done. Yeah. Fricking really well. Really well. So this is his strategy as well and he’s definitely I would say 80% bookish content. A hundred percent fantasy content. Yes. So if you are in a fantasy, you’re gonna watch Daniel Green and he’s got several hundred thousand subscribers.
And I just, I think that, to be honest, it’s a very untapped thing for most authors, cuz I don’t think like truly like authors who’ve really focused on, honing in their great storytelling and learning this publishing business have also developed those skills in tandem for certain people have that skillset, desire.
Yeah. It can be knockout. Yeah. And
I actually watched one of his. Not when you guys are seeing this, but when we’re recording this, I probably videos have to same video on how he did with his self-publishing and a point that he made. Was that him having a YouTube? Oh, it was a cheat code. Yeah.
Yeah. It was a cheat code. And like even if you have a smaller YouTube channel still amazing. It’s still a cheat code and it is potentially a gateway to not only a much larger YouTube channel, but a much larger following for your books. Oh, and your books blowing up. Yeah. Yeah. And on that, I think that, I think he also issued a challenge for us in that video cuz he did seem a little skeptical of the subscription model.
Yeah. Which I think that, but his all of his skepticism of that scene pointed on, can you actually deliver the complete story, like when you say you do. Yeah. So I think that maybe we should take as a challenge to be like, all right, I’m gonna make sure that, I just finished my story, that I set a consistent pace for myself.
Whether that’s once a week, once a month, whatever, where that’s I think is a call for kind of what you and Emila especially have been encouraging, which is be very transparent with your readers. Be very clear about what you’re getting from each tier. And consistency not being every day, every.
Just being, what works for you? What works for you at whatever interval it is.
That’s, that is the biggest, I think, and I agree with his criticism only because I think that it’s, especially in the YouTube ecosystem. Less so in the author ecosystem. And there’s, I think more so why this is the case is cuz YouTube Dean’s younger and I would say that there’s been a lot more people who maybe have joined these things and not even like being a degree of like less self-awareness.
Not, this isn’t always true. YouTube’s gotten a lot older in the last fi four years. Really. But up until that point, subscription platforms and subscription services picked up in YouTube and podcasting long before they picked up in the book market. Yeah. And so
most of the stuff on there was younger readers.
Yes. Doing fan fiction. Yes. And not doing their original stuff. And I had quite a few where I was like, I got to chapter like 80 and then yeah, it’s done and it’s done, but it’s not done. I need more
chapters. Exactly. And that’s the worst tell complete stories. It’s the worst feeling. And what happens to that, and this is why I think subscriptions have taken a bit longer to take off because, on free reading platforms, this would happen all the time.
But the expectation of the person’s okay, it is free and I got burnt and that stinks, but there’s more free stuff and that’s still a bad experience. I’m not gonna Yeah, doubt, doubt it.
But I didn’t pay for it. Yeah. I enjoyed what I did. I’m gonna go find the next story and I just hope that there is another
good story.
Yes. Am Amazon and other retailers have been, more complete books. Again, a lot of books maybe weren’t to reader’s taste, you’ve seen the Good books Rise to the Top. But in subscriptions, we’ve actually literally seen like this demand for the market, but not actually like enough authors taking it seriously and doing it well to build that long-term trust.
Yeah. So there’s been certain things like Daniel’s alluded to in his video that I think are true, that yeah, when someone gets, we’re all in this together. If someone gets burnt by an author subscription, once or twice where that promise like leaves them off in a cliffhanger in the middle of the book and that author never comes back, like mental health issues happen.
Life, life emergencies happen. Don’t feel like you can’t take a break. But if like we all collectively just continually are never transparent in our communication and never follow through in our promises, that makes this market much, much tougher for a reader to trust. Yeah. But we are slowly seeing that change and I think maybe slowly is becoming quicker and we’re also seeing a lot more authors who are really taking this very seriously.
Yeah. Enter into it. So I think we will prove Daniel wrong. Yeah. But very good point, bringing that up. And
I think one way that we can do that is what I’m planning on doing with my books once. I was gonna do it once they’re out of Kendall Unlimited, but I want to give Kendall Unlimited one more shot with my complete edition of my trilogy that’s coming out in the summer, which is like a fat book.
So it might actually be worth yeah, the reads. But once I start my subscription, while I’m going to start doing an early access with like fresh new content, if you’re on Ream or you’re on Patreon, put, just put your back list up there. But on the free platforms, if you’re willing to do that and you’re willing to take that chance, if you like me, need a bit wider readership, go and post them one by one.
Yeah. Because then not only will you get a bit wider of a reach of people who, book Funnel has an audience, after you do a certain amount of book funnels, like I’m already at that point, like I will get, 30 people that clicked on my book funnel book. And it’s like, all right, all but two of you are already on my list.
And like they might just be a freebie hunter. They might have read it a long time ago and be clicking on it again cuz they forgot, or they are just clicking on every single thing on there. With, if you experiment with each of these subscription platforms, these free the, or sorry, the free reader platforms, Again, like we were talking about, you’re gonna find, maybe this one’s not where my audience is, but maybe this one is.
Yeah. And you also part, part of the reason why I’m gravitating towards subscription content is out of pure laziness posting is your marketing, which is what I was talking about earlier with directing people to your story. All of these serial free platforms, they have audiences baked in.
There are people that are not, like on TikTok, there is a what Pad talk. There are people that they don’t read books, they read what pad they’re always on, what pad and TikTok is just a way for them to find the other stories on what pad? Yeah. That are what they like. And so if you’re posting on what pad, there are people on there that are just gonna find it.
If you’re posting on Literotica, if you’re posting on Royal Road, there are people there who have found stories that they like. And if you’ve already, like I have written three or four books, not made a ton of money off of them yet, and are looking into go into subscription, what better way to prime people for what you’re launching your subscription with than taking your back list, posting a chapter at a time, putting in author notes.
And, hopefully not only gaining a community, but hopefully gaining people who go, I loved the story. I want to have this on my bookshelf. Yeah. They go and buy your book and maybe they even leave a review and cuz that’s oh sure. They read your entire story for free, but then they turned into a fan or a super fan, they bought your paper back.
Maybe even your hard cover. Yes. Which gives you a better royalty share Oh yeah. Than an ebook or Kindle Unlimited points. And they’re probably gonna write a review, which like,
that’s huge because readers now, know that reviews do help. Yeah. A lot of them do. Yeah.
And cuz if I don’t have time to do a review the as much as I want it to, I at least leave a rating.
Yes, they do. Which that prompt, which like, that’s huge. If I only have, three or four review, if I see a book that, doesn’t have a ton of reviews, but has 500, 1,005 star ratings on it, that doesn’t make much of a difference to me. That says, okay, that’s good. Yeah.
That’s a good sign.
Yeah. No, that’s, I there’s a ton of great insights there and what I want to now shift to is thinking about you have your tier and you don’t want to make them overwhelming and you also are wondering whether you should have one or two subscription platforms. And I figured maybe we could actually pull up your.
And look at your tiers and think through whether what you should do with your tier, if you wanna make them less overwhelming Gotcha. Look through if they are overwhelming.
So thi so the one that I have up will not be helpful for that. Okay. Because that one is the, is short, sweet, simple. I know what I want to do with it.
Yeah. It’s four tiers and that’s all I need. The one that I’m still building content for my actual books. Yeah. Actually haven’t figured out we can edit this part out. I haven’t figured out how to make a second ream yet. I don’t know if that’s something that I actually have to contact you guys about yet.
Oh.
Will is whitelist your next email. Okay. That’s how you do Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
But yeah, so I what I’m planning on doing is essentially I want to have starting out just early access one sci-fi one fantasy. Exactly. And so we’ve got two tiers there. And then, all access. So you can read both if you want.
But then the other thing that I was talking about earlier was the audio component. Yeah. Yeah. And so that would be its own tier. But then I could, that could just be early access, but then there’s also the author commentary. So that’s five. And as I was thinking about. I think possibly a good way to do this, which I think maybe you guys have commented on, not dived deep into yet, but maybe just mentioned here and there is a rollout phase.
Yeah. Which has staggered rollout because I think that, at least for me, the way that I can do things is start out with my audio cuz that’s the one that I’m gonna have soonest and that’s the one that I can, I have my existing material, I can, just throw up my back matter. Hey, you can listen to the audio early access, you can also read ahead right.
If you want to. Yeah, there you go. And maybe put that up for three months, see how it does. Hopefully it’ll do pretty well. Yeah. Yeah. But then regard, and that would be early access audio and then the audio commentary. And I think I’d probably do those as where the audio commentary includes the early access as well.
Yeah. Excuse me. So that’s just two tiers. Yeah. And then once I have, excuse me, sorry about that. Take your head once I have my next story ready, I go ahead and that’s probably gonna be sci-fi. Go ahead and put up the early access sci-fi tier. Yeah. And then after that, I would ideally roll out my fantasy tier.
And so then that’s four tiers, but staggered. I like that a lot. And then you have the fifth all access one.
I like that a real lot because my general advice is to decrease the time and stress that you have from going from, I don’t have a subscription set up to making your first dollar, to having your first subscriber.
And just thinking about it, having all these different I tiers, it’s very difficult to even test what is working. And what kind of, like we were talking about earlier with all these different serial fiction platforms and marketing methods, how do you know which marketing method’s working? Likewise, you don’t know what tier is working.
If you launch with 12, you’re not talking about launching 12. Yeah, exactly. But if you were, you would’ve no idea which one’s really attracting readers because you not only get them overwhelmed, but, and in any subscription platform, the first tier they’re most likely to see is the first one. That shows up, which, and everyone I’ve looked at, basically it’s sorted based on price. They’ll see the cheapest one first that’s designed to try and get people into your subscription. Then they can upgrade later. But that means that all that other tiers, there’s a chance they don’t even look at it like you could.
These three or four high tiers that your fans really want, but they might not have even signed up immediately, which, there’s nothing wrong with that, but how I usually recommend doing these things. Cause I’ve seen authors actually in the process of migrating, let’s say from Patreon to Reem, in that process they will actually talk about their other tiers more.
And their existing fans who will look at the tiers more closely, who’ve already been in it, will upgrade it at a much higher rate. It’s a very oh, nice. It’s a nice side effect. Yeah. It’s something we observed like on like day one with Amelia’s audience and have continued to see over and over again.
With more and more authors. What that means to me is that it literally takes time to educate your readers on all the tiers you have. And most of the time the problem isn’t even necessarily having too much tiers. It’s not subtly driving awareness of different tiers to readers who are already in your subscription, what we call like upselling once they’re in.
So the biggest thing would be in the beginning to have the marketing challenge of trying to drive people at these higher tiers or audio tiers and try and get people in at the ebook tiers and everything at once is a lot. So first just test and see, yeah, what is the demand for audio thing? You’ll know it, those people will be in, then you could do the ebook, early access release with sci-fi and fantasy.
Might do sci-fi verse then fantasy or. Then you test that out and that could be literally something you roll out over the period of half a year. This isn’t something you have to do like in succession week one, week two. I would never really recommend making tier changes, like opening up a new tier more than like once a month.
Unless there’s a really huge rapid growth or huge expansion or change in your business going on. Yeah. So giving yourself, one month to come out with a new tier or two depending on like the phased rollout, I think is the best way to go about it. And then you can let the fans know who are already subscribed to you in those first two tiers about that phased rollout and see what that response is to it.
That is so helpful. Especially as you one day have these like higher ticket tiers. Yeah. That’ll be like huge.
Yeah. And the the, so the other part where whether or not I think I need to have two rings or two subscription platforms. Yeah. Yeah. So that part comes in with the bonus content that I was talking about earlier because for me I do a lot of world building for my stuff because I want to have a lot of stories set in the same world.
And so that’s just put in a little bit more e effort to polish it off and I can have something up there for my readers that I know that they would be interested in cuz it’s something I’d be interested in. Yeah. The issue though, where that comes as far as not complicating a subscription platform though, is where I don’t want to just have a bonus content tier or like an early access bonus content tier.
Because I, my end goal is I actually went to school not for anything related to writing, but for music. So I want to start out with little word world building articles this is what was happening at this time and this place. Here’s a little bit about the culture. Here’s a nice map for you.
Maybe down the line, here’s some artwork. If I can find a good artist and afford them, and then, and music too. And then here is the theme for this culture or this nation, or this, here’s a song that they, here’s one of their folk songs or
by the end of this decade, yeah, you’ll be able to tell, a no-code video game generation machine to create you pump in all of your content and it’ll create you world.
I swear by the end of this decade, that’ll happen. So there’s gonna be a lot of change. So thinking just to the future of where you might expand bonus content thinking about like ream, like internally, I just know that we’re going to make a simpler version, display a lot of tiers. So if you had.
Maybe like more content story focused tiers than bonus content focused tiers. There will be a way to display that. That’s much simpler than we have now. Okay. Like where we intentionally build a system that readers and authors would feel familiar with at this stage. Okay. But two or three years from now will probably not look anything like it does today.
Hopefully. That’s a lot better. That’s awesome. I guess my first thing on that, knowing that you’re ties someone who could influence how this looks for you. We should definitely, I think from your own perspective it’s way easier to manage one ream. It’s way easier to have one community.
Yeah. And you are able to manage unlimited tiers from one ream where you can segment out, post segment out chapters. There’s no reason you can’t have it. It just becomes more of this, content overload point from like the subscriber standpoint when they’re there. Yeah. Another thing as well is someone might want to be part of two tiers in that world, right?
Yeah. And right now, and this is true for every subscription platform, you can only be signed up for one tier. But that feels wrong because there’s at least a million reasons I could think of why someone would wanna be signed up for two tiers. Trust me. Like it’s something that could happen.
So if we can accomplish both of those things which I don’t wanna put like a timeline on things cause we have a very long list of things to do, but. That, that is two things that will happen. Okay. See that
I actually didn’t know. Yeah. I didn’t know. You could only be subscribed to a single tier that’s
introduced to everyone.
Yeah. That’s actually true across every platform I’ve ever heard of or seen. And we want to change that about our platform, but that’s a pretty big infrastructure change. So what we’ll do it but we first wanna release support for pen names, admins. There’s a lot of other things to do.
Yeah. But that is on our list. In addition, like right now, you can only have one author have like royalties in a tier. But I could see a future where you might want to have splitting royalties between maybe you and you work with a producer, for instance, on your music tier or the artist itself you split royalties with on.
Yeah. Now you might, they might not wanna do that, but if that artist is like in your community as you’re passionate, what you’re doing, it’s almost a collaboration. These are the types of things I see happening. We don’t allow royalty splits at the moment on tears. No one else does. That’s like very, that’s just a hard thing to do.
But these are all things that, like thinking about like the three to five year future will be possible. All of it. Awesome. Thinking about today frankly, if you wanna do this today, you would have to Okay. Because you would not be able to have a fan beyond the bonus content. And the early access tiers.
Okay. And that would be, I think, a bad idea for you. Yeah. Because you’re gonna have people interested in both and you deserve to get paid for both. So yeah, that’s my big advice right now. Like just functionally you would need to have to As time goes on, I think it would be more advantageous to have one once the kind of technology limits are okay.
Not, and then would you say is the same, excuse me, say the same thing for a kind of hybrid nonfiction and fiction thing where basically what I want to eventually do is build my book with me. Cuz that, cause that would basically be, here’s the book I’m writing, let me take you through my process.
So it’s behind the scenes. Yeah. For people who are a fan of my work. But then it could also potentially be, here’s an example writing process for other authors that’s who may not care about reading my work.
Yeah I would say with that, cuz that’s probably gonna be like a higher ticket item at $50 a month, I’m imagining.
Yeah, maybe even more. Maybe you wanna do it a hundred. But that’s definitely that’s a very valuable thing. My personal kind of recommendation with that is that having that on the same one makes sense. Even in a world in which you can only subscribe to one tier at a time. Because you can easily give them all formats.
They’re literally helping you create it. Yeah. That seems fair to me. Yeah. And I would imagine that people would wanna have access to the things that they help create, even if they’re maybe not a sole fan of yours. That’s fair. I feel like most of them would be anyways. But even if they’re not, that’s a very small edge case of someone who like literally doesn’t care about the other tiers at.
Wants that tier and to be honest, like in their situation it’s this is what the tier costs anyways. So what I would just make sure when you price that tier bake in the fact that they’re gonna get all the things in the other tiers as well, so that this is like a true, like high ticket item that’s one might want.
Okay. Now I wouldn’t count fizzle goods in that, obviously. Oh, yeah. Everything digital I would give them because they’re like literally in the world with you. Especially if they’re gonna help you, you have no idea of them just experiencing your back lists, for instance, if that’s there, all these other things are there that could be really useful for you.
Okay. Awesome. That’d be my advice in that. But you get, and people listening might have a different approach to that. That would just be like my logic on that. Gotcha.
Awesome.
We’ve covered, we covered a lot of ground. I think the last thing that you were curious about, although there might be more which I, we can keep going, but it was the developing a CUNY or a reader group.
Yes. Focus. Yeah. That is something that for me, I am just like, I wouldn’t say terrified, but it’s the whole go to assigning and no one shows up sort of thing. Like at what one? For a that’s one part of it. For one, it’s a when do you start that Facebook group that you can hopefully have some of your subscribers.
Hey, you should check out his subscription. It’s awesome. Yeah. Yeah. But also let’s just talk about his book and then the second part of that is I think Discord is usually the platform that people use for their Patreon subscribers to foster a community managing that just seems terrifying to me.
Discords interesting cuz I’ve seen more dead discords for authors than active ones. Really. It depends on the genre. Lit, RPG and fantasy, definitely that readership’s more in tune with Discord. But for like Simi romance, it depends. That’s a huge market with a lot of diverse readers obviously.
Yeah. But Facebook tends to be more the home for them. Okay. Now that will be changing be new CUNY platforms. There already is like a lot of upstarts too that can compete with Discord. So it’s tough to say where things will be, but what I would suggest is that you don’t necessarily have to create a CUNY just for you.
I’ve also seen tons of di cus around like a specific author’s content that haven’t been able be successful. I’ve seen a lot on the other end of the extreme. It’s tough now if I was like looking to really build, I think a very durable community that would attract like lots of super fans that the content I produce.
And actually be like a funnel for new fans. Yeah. I think it would be very wise to create a community focused on a subgenre. The, that you may be right in. Okay. For your specific audience. That. Might not, there might not be a home for those readers everywhere. So they’re gonna wanna come to your land to hang out and then Yeah.
They end up you’re gonna be end up being the place that they’ll find some books from you and they’ll read it because you’re the one running it. You’ll build able trust in it, but it doesn’t have to become this whole pressure to have all the talk about your work, all the talk to be about this. And then you are able to actually work with other authors.
An example of this is Ling and Shelby Lee Ash Ashley and Elizabeth and Shelby Lee they’re two authors in the Subscriptions for Authors Facebook group and they actually started an author group that’s a offshoot descriptions for authors. It’s totally been approved cuz I’ve worked with them for a while and they’re awesome.
They’ve taken a lead and crushed it. It’s called Subscribe to the Dark Love and, okay. Yeah, I think I saw their post about that. Yeah. It’s just for Dark Romance authors and then off of that they’re creating a dark romance reader group that’s for subscription authors. They all be collaborating on. Oh, nice.
Now Shelby does have her own reader. Group. Ling does have her own reader group, but I mean they’re even seeing what their own reader groups that there’s a lot of opportunity just create a collaborative group. So I would say like before you do your own thing, collaborate with others, that’s what Jane’s about.
Okay. Yeah. And then, yeah, if that’s going really well, people are like, just really want to talk about your books more then just. Like descriptions for authors Facebook group, there’s the big group and now there’s that little group that’s little compared to the big group. Focus on dark love.
And dark romance, I should say. Sorry, forgot the dark love. And that’s something that, your then community could become an offshoot of the bigger genre because you’re not gonna define Yeah. Even if your book defines the genre there will be other authors in that genre. Yeah. Undoubtedly.
Yeah. So that would be like my approach to it, if you’re building a community, build a community of authors as well. Build a real CUNY of readers that’s focused on providing value to them so that there’s a reason that you would join the group, even if you like, weren’t like a fan of you, because then otherwise your CUNY won’t be a place of discovery.
Which is fine. I really think that’s fine. But I think everything an author does ideally somehow circles back to getting them paid and getting them more fans. It can follow that flywheel and there’s a more direct correlation there. So that would be Okay. My
approach to it. I like that. And then the other part of that was four, cause I’m sure I’m not the only author in this situation, but four authors who have Yeah.
A not safer word, pen name one. And especially if you don’t want that associated with your main pen name, whether it’s because you write Sweet Romance and you don’t want that meshing with Yeah. With your steamier content or you write stuff that’s ya or something like that. You just do not want any crossover.
If you want to create a Facebook group or a Facebook page for your author that’s like a f or for your pen name, that’s a fan page. You have to be the one, like there has to be an actual Facebook profile of hosting that. And I know some people have been able to get through and be like, oh yeah, this is a person Facebook Facebook is their BS meter is on point for me.
Apparently they just know that my pen name is fake. But so have you ever, have you seen any good strategies to get around that or any other communities? Yeah. I Where
you can do that? Yeah. I would say I can’t I, I don’t know and probably shouldn’t give advice and like getting around Facebook’s terms service.
That is fair. Especially cuz it’ll change. That is fair. I think my advice would be one, one of two things, this instance, one is that obviously the issue here is creating like a profile for your pending name and that means that you don’t have a presence for that pen name on Facebook at the moment.
Yeah. So that, that’s obviously something that. Might make Facebook then, not the platform for you. But there’s so many other, I can think of tons of places where there’s steamy romance coons. Like it’s, they’re everywhere. That might then mean that actually Discord does become the place that you focus on.
Okay. Because Discords better about that. Maybe you use something like Geneva or Mighty Networks. If you’re working with another group of authors, it’s less in Geneva to be like, oh, we’re just here. It’s no, we’re all gonna do this together. This is all a place we get access to. And to be frank as well with Facebook’s policies, I’m never gonna, sit here and say they’re a champion of steam romance content and the conversations.
Yeah. No, they’re not. Might want to go on in these communities. They’re not at all. So they might like Facebook, although a lot of people use it. It is definitely where I think a lot of the cus happen today. I don’t know if that’ll be the place that happens tomorrow and given it used to be not as stringent too, if these policies around profiles. But I’ve just continually heard all these bad stories. It’s something that I would recommend going to, Geneva Mighty Network Circle or Discord. Those four pla, one of those four platforms, readers nowadays. Discord is something that’s like mainstream at this point.
Yeah. So it’s not, it’s free. All these places are free. So the tough part is you do have to then learn a new platform as an author, but that’s then where collaboration can help because maybe you find an author that actually knows a bit about Discord and can handle a lot of the discord, admining stuff.
Maybe you’re focused more on the content brainstorming or responding to the comments, the community, so you can divide and conquer in that sense. Yeah. So it’s not all on you. And then in the process, as you’ll become more familiar with Discord. Yeah. I do think as well from a community standpoint, Facebook isn’t that great.
Groups are really good for forums. I think they definitely are like the modern day forums, but in terms of one-on-one relationship building Yeah. And being able to have conversations, that’s not really what Facebook’s built for. No, yeah. That is true. And reader CUNYs, I think are less forum based at their core, even though a lot take place on Facebook.
Like they’re definitely more suited for conversations and sharing. Yeah. So I think Discord has a much better setup for that, and it’s free to use for everyone. Yeah. So I think that would be my
answer. Okay. For sure. And yeah, I’ve even seen like I’m in Brian McLean’s Reader Group and he has that on Slack.
Yeah. I don’t think I’d recommend Slack personally. Yeah. I didn’t mention it. Only because Slack, for those who are thinking that some people might love Slack. But
I think that’s usually used more for like work Arc and beta. Oh, A and beta. Yeah.
Yeah. If you’re like really doing that, it’s more associated with like work in a sense.
Yeah. Because it’s an enter. SaaS platform and I don’t think anyone would want like their books and their reader relationship to be associated with work. And a lot of readers like literally might use Slack and have like their work Slack be right there, like one click away that doesn’t feel calming to me.
Yeah. At all. So I definitely think like discord is typically like more all purpose. Yeah. And
yeah, and it seems more in
informal and people are using it. That’s the key thing. Like people are actually opening the app, people are actually using it because people talk about algorithms all the time and like how Facebook algorithm suppresses your content.
It’s very true and you don’t always get to reach your audience, but if you have a thousand people who use an app and only a hundred people open it each day, then that’s, you’re gonna see a low reach and it’s nothing the app can do about it. There’s no algorithm suppressing your content. Yeah. The behavior isn’t there, but I think the behavior has shifted towards Discord.
Pretty mightily. You’ll just have to note that like probably the reader demographics that are gonna be most interested would be like Gen Z, millennials, maybe Gen Xers. Yeah. There, there’s certain readers that might not be as familiar. Yeah.
Although I like those reader demographics. For me, those are the ones that like to buy books and have big bookshelves and
show off books.
So I, I would say it’s shocking that like the younger generations are truly, I think, spending like an amount of money on content broadly where Gen Z even says that. Like they’re the most likely out of all generations to pay for content. Yeah. That’s wild to me cuz they have obviously the least spending power right now.
Millennials are also very. Pay for content who’s actually least likely to pay our baby boomers. Yeah. Which, no, no shade. That’s all good. But I think our younger generation in a, in an age of free content everywhere has been trained that good content is worth paying for. Yeah. So it’s very interesting.
Oh
yeah, no, cuz Yeah. My, I know my grandparents won’t even they’ll go, there’s nothing good on tv and they will not try to set up a Netflix subscription or anything like that. Yeah. Even if I’m like, the exact show you are talking about that you want to come back is right here.
Yeah. It’s, definitely generational differences in reading and behavior.
Even like CUNY for instance is not something that like, by and large, I think that is something that a more younger demographic is more interested in to begin with. A more like internet native generation. And I think that’s also, we see, like in the Facebook group actually what’s really interesting is like our Facebook group, I believe skews younger than the broader community.
Not by a ton, but probably I think I would agree with that. I just know I’m just like, on the back end I see the demographics. And our average age is 30 to 40. Where, and that’s like our strongest age. And we have a good bit of people. 2030, we have a bunch of people, 40 to 50, but 65 plus, like I, and I know many of 65 plus people in our county who are listening and you’re awesome.
I love you. But I also know that some of you have literally told me that you feel. There’s not a lot of us around here in the subscription land, and statistically it’s true. They’re actually in our Facebook group of 2000 people. It’s like a very tiny percentage, 65 plus. And I would bet you that 20 bucks, 50 k has a higher proportion.
I, I, yeah. I’m not, it’s I think people can succeed and be a part of online communities and be scription authors at all different ages, but there definitely is and data to back this up, a generational propensity to have certain online behavior Oh, yeah. That other generations might have less of propensity for, which I find frankly fascinating because going into it, I was very aware of kind like the average demographics, the author community.
And I think this hasn’t skewed wildly young, mind you. But this has skewed younger than I thought, and maybe me and Amelia being younger have a sort of something to do with that. But I also do think it’s a subscription
thing. Oh yeah. Because that, yeah, that’s something that like, and you, not even with just like content, but with like food or clothing.
Yeah. Or that’s something where if my parents or someone like a little bit older than me or my friends hears about it, they’ll be like, that’s strange. I guess that’s a neat idea of you, getting a subscription for your food. And then if it’s something, someone my age, someone younger, they’re like, oh.
Yeah, I get all my clothes through, thread up. I get my my food through HelloFresh or whatever it is. Yeah. That that’s how I do my life. Like I, I watch my YouTube channel that I’m subscribed to. I just do everything based on subscription. Cuz that’s something that was not even really as prevalent with me growing up.
I don’t think like nineties kids saw that too much.
No. Cause it wasn’t even really possible. Yeah. If you were to subscribe to something before the internet age,
It was a newspaper
or a magazine. Yeah. And you’d have to like, send in bills. Yeah. Like I have Lego
magazine that’s, that was my subscription
and the payment process, because it wasn’t like really all that automatic oftentimes was cumbersome.
But it, a lot of financial techno and they still have a long way to go. But FinTech platforms have really enabled like a lot of new business models and it’s something too that has been a lot of pressure put towards as well with like app store policies and things of that sort like people might wonder why Amazon shifted to can eliminate, and there, there’s many reasons, but one of the huge ones was every time someone has to buy in the Kindle lab, if they’re buying content, they have to pay a 30%. In reality, Amazon doesn’t let them pay that 30% fee to Apple. Yeah. In reality, they redirect them to the site and then have them purchase, but they see conversions probably go down by over half that way.
Yeah. Oh yeah. Cause it’s less convenient.
Oh yeah. When I finish a book that I have bought that is not in Kindle and Limited, there’s always, and I want to go on to the next one. There’s always that I have to go back. Yeah. I have to open it up on my browser and make sure the browser doesn’t immediately take me into the Amazon app.
Yeah. Yeah. And, or I just, you know what, I’m gonna put my phone down. I’m gonna go on my computer and do it like tomorrow morning. I’m
just not gonna read it. And then some people don’t get back to it. Yeah. As you get back to the next book and the tbr and that’s why KU is a program that you pay for it once on the site, but now you get access to all these books just in the app and it reduces friction.
And you’ve seen that, Cobo Plus is the same way, obviously. So there’s a reason for all of these things. And even something funny about Reim cuz people ask us like are you in the app store? And the answer is no, we’re not. But we have an app. You can download the app.
But we download directly from the site. And I won’t get like super nerdy about the backend technology behind it, but clearly like people need to be able to subscribe to our authors on our site frictionlessly. And what we’ve realized was like we would be creating a sort of experience that, like the reason why.
You can find new authors frictionlessly on Amazon cause you don’t have to pay them. You’re going from one KU author to another and you’re never opening up your credit card. Yeah. But that is not the system we want to create. We want to create a system where people directly support creative people, which means they’re, when they go to that next person going to have to pay, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Consumers are open to doing it. But they’re not open to going to another app, being redirected and redirected again, that whole process. Yeah. And there’s multiple things and we’ll continue improving over time but that is actually the biggest reason why we at this stage have a new web app technology that we utilized that allows you to still access it in the phone, still even push notifications, which we’ll be rolling out but not actually be in the store.
Cuz we avoid that 30% fee and that fee is huge. And there’s a lot of other companies that have done this. Uber’s done this before, like this is a common thing. But yeah, it’s crazy how these like little things shift like huge decisions to how companies work because this has been like if you are digital first company, you wanna avoid those payment processing fees in the app because they destroy your margins, they destroy what creative people can make so people got creative.
Yep. So it’s obviously, the subscription model broadly, it’s just something people are used to now. Yeah, it’s
very interesting. So hopefully that’s good for us cuz people just become more and more used to it and then, hopefully when. All of us now who are going, Hey, let’s get into this, are a bit more established.
We will hopefully see something like the Kindle boom where a lot of people started going, oh, I need to get a Kindle. Yeah, I need to get all these eBooks. I need, Hey, these are not as expensive as traditional books. I need to do this. And we’ll hopefully see a lot of people going here’s this subscription platform where I don’t just get a book.
I get to interact with the author. I maybe get bonus content, I get access to their back list and oh, here, there’s a bunch of other authors on these platforms like that. I could be really great for us if people just keep getting more and more used to subscriptions as the way to consume content, not just through, visual and audio media, but through reading.
I also think that the place that stories have in people’s lives has fundamentally shifted from 30 years ago. 30 years ago, you’d go to an indie bookstore, probably like in person or maybe a big chain bookstore, but even probably as 40 years ago, 30 years ago, big chain book stores were at their peak.
But regardless, you would go in person, buy a book, you’d read that book, and you would still spend, maybe time with your family in front of the television. You would spend time. At the dinner table, your family and all these things. You have social interactions. People would go Y M C A club, sports.
All these activities are drastically down. It’s wild to see. Robert Putnam wrote a book on this 20 years call ago called Bowling Alone. Which is basically about the degradation of CUNY in America 20 years ago. Since then, I think by all accounts it’s got an only much worse. Yeah.
So we basically live in a world where when people are consuming your stories, the place that it has in their lives is so much more profound. It becomes, especially now, cause more stories are personalized, more niche than ever because of indies. Like people make their friends through reading, which this has always happened, but this is now just more common than ever you, and
it’s now easier to do that too.
Cause there some platforms easier to just connect with other readers, other fandoms.
And the value proposition of reading has fundamentally changed. Cause it’s not just about escaping into a great story and taking up some of your entertainment time. It’s true. Like social connection, belonging, and status, which are some of the highest order human needs.
Which means that people are actually willing to pay a lot more for fiction than we think because what we’re able to. When we actually control that customer relationship and can give them some of those things, it provide a much, much more valuable experience. And we’ve seen this movement in other industries.
And I won’t go on a rant about it, but if you’re interested in the adult film industry that has happened there, and I’m sure everyone knows what I’m referencing, but it’s been a huge deal. Yeah.
And what with stories holding a much more important place in people’s hearts just for the
Oh,
big time.
Big time. That’s something where I don’t know if Charleston is the same, might be a similar thing, but I grew up in an area where the demographic is not very diverse. I went to a school where the demographic is not very diverse. It was very much a bubble and it fed people to other bubbles. And so for me, a lot of the way that I was able to get into other people’s heads was, which I may not have met, was through fiction.
Yeah. And now that we have more people of color, people of, other groups like, people with certain with dyslexia, with certain mental disorders, if they are still called that, if. That’s not the politically correct way, I apologize. But
People sometimes would say neurodivergent.
Neurodivergent.
Yes. Yeah. People whose experiences are different than our own. Yes. Yes. That is how I learn through that. That is how I totally go, oh, this is what this person is like. I haven’t encountered a person like this before cuz I haven’t either been to that part of the country where these people live or I have not been to their country.
Yes. Yeah. And that’s not something I’m gonna be able to realistically do for a while, but I can maybe get a little bit better than I was by reading about it. Yeah. And that’s something that, because that has had such a huge impact on me, that’s what I seek to do with my books. Like I want to draw from as many different cultures as I can to maybe one, just have somebody go, this is a person that’s different from me, but they’re not so different.
Like I can relate to them. Yeah. We
all they’re super
different. Relate to. Yeah. And then also just like with one, one of my favorite series ever is Wheel of Time. Oh yeah. Yeah. And something that was super cool for me was there’s the group of people that’s the Seak in that where they’re based, I think heavily off of South Asian cultures.
They have part of their culture is tattooing that’s basically a reference to henna tattooing and certain piercings having different meanings. And I just remember on a Reddit thread, somebody going, my culture does that. That’s so awesome to see this in a fantasy book. I don’t see that much.
And like I, if somebody, if I can write something where just some person says, Hey, this isn’t something that I’ve seen in a fantasy book before, but it’s something I’m familiar with, that’s awesome. I will be happy about that.
And the reverse is true as well. By having someone who is now familiar with what you’re writing, be exposed to it.
When someone sees that in the real world, instead of feeling like, oh, that’s so different. That’s so Yeah. Othering, right?
I’ll go, wait I’ve read something, I read about this like this. That’s cool. I
want to know more about that. Exactly. It comes from a place of like love rather than, a more divisive place that we could often get to when we don’t really empathize with others.
Because that’s what fiction does. It brings us in a space where we can actually be inside the character’s mind. And I’ve heard it described by like story science theorist as like basically an empathy machine. That’s what these things do. And there’s really nothing else in this world like reading fiction or listening to fiction that really does that. So it’s a really special thing. And I think that there’s a lot of converging things. Make a lot of opportunity for authors, but now it goes back to creating amazing things people wanna read. Which brings me to where can we read your stories? Yeah.
My stories are the main place I would just go is my website, spencer russell smith.com.
I have all my social links there. You can find me on TikTok as Spencer Smith author on Instagram as Spencer Russell Smith. Author, wordy name.
You gotta get the
full yeah. Hope, hopefully maybe re in a very short amount of time after this comes out, I’ll have a YouTube channel. It’ll probably be Spencer Russell Smith.
But yeah, if you go to my website, you’ll be able to find my most recent book as well as the other three out that I’ve written. For anybody wondering, I write space opera and science Fantasy going to go into just fantasy soon. But my most recent books are about three women who are all at odds at with each other right when the world ends.
And there is a lot of mag tech hard magic systems. LGBTQ representation, found family and it basically just explores who is really to blame for our actions and when do we need to take responsibility, even if we can shift outta that. I love it. And it’s a really fun series that was supposed to be one book and a short little novel and ended up being four novels.
Relatable. That happens.
Yeah, that happens. And there’s just gonna be a lot more in that world. And you’re gonna hopefully find a lot more content from me as things go forward consistent.
And he will under promise and over deliver. Thank you so much for being here. This was an awesome cover.
Yeah,
this was awesome. I’m definitely excited to be here.
And that’s it for this episode. Once again, huge thank you to Spence for coming on and diving so deep with us. Like, there’s a benefit to these two hour podcasts. I know they’re long, but when we go so deep with someone and get to really learn through what they’re thinking, how they’re going through things, how they’re going to grow their subscription, what their worries are, what their hopes are, it makes it just so much easier for us to all approach our own subscriptions and our author journeys.
At least, that’s my hope. But, I hope you have a All are having an amazing week, slash weekend, depending on when you listen to this, since folks might be listening to this way in the future. We have a lot of exciting things that we’re working on behind the scenes. Literally, like, more than I can even share.
But all I’ll say is that the best is yet to come. And that our commitment this year at Reem is to move faster, focus even more, and build a 10x better subscription platform for authors. Not just better, 10x better. That’s our goal, and I think we’re off to a good start. We’ll start sharing some things soon.
In the meantime, I hope everyone has an amazing rest of their day. And don’t forget. Don’t forget. This is super important. Because we’re dedicating our lives to this mission. Okay? This is what we want to do. This is how we want to change publishing. And you all are doing it with us because, because this is what we want to do.
We storytellers of the world. And you are those storytellers. And it’s why you can’t ever forget. Ever. That you rule the world. That storytellers for the world. I’ll see y’all next one.