Posted on March 2, 2024
In this episode, Michael shares the 3 biggest lessons he’s learned after fiction authors have made $1 million on Ream on how to start and grow a successful subscription as an author.
#71 Transcript:
You. Awesome. All right. Welcome to lessons from 1, 000, 000 on Ream, 1, 000, 000 in subscriptions. Um, and to be clear, this is authors now making 1, 000, 000 a year on the platform. So this is all subscriptions. So it’s, it’s kind of a lot of data. It’s a lot of lessons. It’s a lot of people who have tried different things across many different genres, whether it’s horror, whether it’s sweet romance, whether it’s spicy romance, whether it’s science fiction, whether it’s fantasy, lit RPG. And there are some lessons I think we can walk away with. As authors of any genre that can help us start, grow, and hopefully just have better subscriptions as authors. Now, before I officially get into the slides, share a little bit about subscriptions, share the big lessons, and some takeaways for all of you. I want to first just share a little bit about me. I think a lot of you already know about me, a lot of you probably already know about Reem, know about subscriptions for authors. But if you’re new here, if you don’t know me, hello, my name is Michael, um, I am the CEO of Ream, and Ream is a subscription platform by fiction authors for fiction authors. We run a community of authors called Scriptions for Authors, which is a Facebook group, it’s a podcast, it’s also a newsletter, and we try and create basically anything that can help an author grow their subscription, whether it’s a free book we published all about subscriptions, which you can find on any retailer. As descriptions for authors, um, you also can listen to the free audio book on Spotify or YouTube. You could go get it on Audible, but then you have to pay and why pay for something that’s free? And in addition to that, we also run the descriptions for authors community with an amazing team of all stars. We have Anna, who helps lead the CUNY, help moderate it, but we also have Amelia Rose, who’s an amazing six figure description author who really kind of was the founding inspiration for this all, because when I met her, she was doing really well in descriptions, but she was not using a platform suited to her needs, that’s why we built RAINN, which is for fiction authors, by fiction authors, but we also were like, wait, I didn’t even know, being an author for three years, I’d published 12 science fiction novels, I I was like very deep into publishing. I didn’t even know you could make money in subscriptions as an author. So when I met Amelia and learned this, I was like, we have to share this with the world. So that’s why we create descriptions for authors. So however you found us, you may have found us through these channels. You may have found us through a friend. Just want to say thank you for being here. And I hope I can teach you some really core crucial lessons that when you walk away from today will help you take your subscription forward. Or if you’re not going to have a subscription, take your author career forward into the next level. So, First thing I want to share, like, what are subscriptions, right? So it’s a recurring payment that a reader makes directly to an author in exchange for access to content, community, or other benefits. We probably all have some subscriptions in our life, thinking like, you know, maybe cable, if you cut the cable cord recently, that’s not a bad thing. If you have, um, well, We want to talk about subscription programs and if you should or not have other subscriptions. We’ll talk about just book subscriptions, but you get the idea, right? And there’s KU in the book subscription world, right? You might be familiar with it. It’s the all in one, you can read, reading buffet program. Um, there’s Audible, which is based on credit programs. All that’s great, all that’s beautiful. Today we’re talking about subscriptions where a reader pays you directly as an author. It could be 5 a month, it could be 10 a month. We even have some authors in Ream who’ve had readers pay them as much as 250. Yes, one individual reader, 250 a month. Uh, probably won’t dive into that specific author’s story, but if you have questions about like these super high tiers, I could, I could talk about that maybe in the final 30 minutes of the hour here. Now you might be thinking, okay, cool. I guess readers can pay authors monthly, but like. Who’s doing this? Are there really readers paying authors monthly? The answer is yes, there are. Um, there’s about 250, 000 individual readers that pay authors a month. Not at Ring, but this is across all platforms. And authors are making, just fiction authors, over 20 million dollars a year from this revenue stream, which is pretty significant when you look at Things like crowdfunding and kickstarters, like by the biggest platform by far, they’re open about their publishing category. That category is in the tens of millions a year. So just when you think about subscriptions, do you think about the opportunity? It’s at a similar level to what crowdfunding is and publishing. So it’s a pretty significant revenue stream. It’s definitely something that can make a big difference for authors. And again, today I want to help you actually take your subscription to the next level. So we have three lessons. I’m going to dive into the first one and I, I’m just going to go to that slide. And I know, I know it’s hard. Simple is better. And I put in parentheses almost always because just one thing in publishing and this is almost always true is it’s always like a game of like, and it’s never like, or it’s very oftentimes like. It’s never like black and white. It’s, it’s very like gray area. That’s what makes art. What makes publishing is what makes subscriptions beautiful is that we get to kind of carve out our own way through things. So I’m going to say that simple is better. I’m sure you could point to exceptions. I’m sure you could tell me like, Oh, but this author is doing this really complicated thing. And you know, they’re successful. Sure. There’s always exceptions to the rule, but let me tell you, this is a rule. Simple is better. And I’ll tell you why with some data behind it. So most readers only look at the first tier and you might wonder how do I know this? It’s not like I’m over every reader’s shoulder looking at the first tier and you might be like well If you’re gonna tell me that they’re converting higher to the first tier That doesn’t surprise me because the first tier is maybe cheaper and it makes sense why more readers would join it But but I have some data that shows that it’s not fully the case So there’s two really interesting data points here that I want to share So the first data point is what we see on the ream platform, which is that very regularly readers will subscribe to that first tier and then upgrade to higher tiers. We’re going to talk more about this behavior later and you might be thinking, again, that’s not surprising. They stay in the subscription for a period of time and they go read some content and they figure out that they want to upgrade tiers. That makes sense, right? What we see is that oftentimes readers will upgrade within minutes of joining the first tier. What this means is that they didn’t go and experience, they couldn’t read a chapter in two minutes. They didn’t go get hooked on your next story that’s sitting in that 10 tier. What ended up happening is that reader had no idea what was in that 10 tier. They got excited, they jumped into that 5 tier, they went and they purchased your subscription, and then once they got to the member page, they checked out your higher tiers. Here’s the thing, readers do this regularly. But think about how many more readers subscribe to that first tier, never see your higher tiers, and they don’t go and check them out again a few minutes later. There’s a lot of them. There’s a second point to this as well, which is that we see when authors migrate platforms, typically the platform that authors are migrating to is from Patreon to Rean. We have basically a migration program where, um, Patrick, Patrick on our team, he’s amazing. He runs author success at Rean. It basically helps people set up their accounts on the platform, migrate their content, and also their members. And part of that process is we go in and we adjust reader’s billing on Reen, their billing cycle, to be the same that it was on Patreon. Therefore people aren’t double charged. Um, they get to come into Reen for free until that day. So if they have an annual subscription, they’ll be comped for five months, maybe, depending on how much months they have left. If it’s a monthly subscription, maybe they’re comped for two or three weeks. So with this, we actually get to see some data on which readers are moving tears, right? Cause we know which tears readers were on Patreon, and then we could see like what tears they’re in a rain and something shocking happens, 10 percent upgrade. And this isn’t. You know, because of anything groundbreaking in reading the software. It’s because these readers are finally taking the time to see the other tiers that that author has. And even though those readers may have been in that subscription for 6 or 12 months, they haven’t actually done that yet. And this relaunch their subscription means that consistently, for almost every 10% The readers upgrade. Okay. Okay, so that’s some fun data. But what? What does that actually mean? Simple is better. People, readers aren’t going to even see all of your tiers if they’re not even gonna see all of your tiers. You better make sure that that first tier is saying that they’re really interested and you better make sure that when it comes time to get them to upgrade, that it’s really clear why they’re upgrading and how that you have a process for that. A funnel for that, right? Because readers just aren’t gonna go look at all your different tiers in day one. There are some who will, right? But most. will not even make it to your final tier. Some other points I want to just share on this lesson is that most readers sign up for one benefit. And, you know, when we see a lot of author subscriptions, It kind of can become a war of over promising, like who has more benefits than the other. So for folks who are new to subscriptions and haven’t seen a lot of subscription pages, I’ll just describe one to you. And even if you have seen them, I think it’ll be useful for me to describe it. So you have a tier, right? And that tier is what’s going to describe the benefits the reader will get when they subscribe. And that tier will be the specific price point. Let’s pretend 5. That’s what we usually recommend to start. Well. Oftentimes, we feel like there’s that box, that description box, that we have to fill it up with as much stuff as possible. And, let me just tell you this. We see a correlation, oftentimes, between authors who have more simple tiers, much more clear benefits, and actual subscriptions. Now, of course, this isn’t a causation type of thing. Right because there’s so much more that goes into it and getting ready to describe than just your tier copy But on that point simple tier copy is certainly better I’m gonna show you two subscriptions once I’m done with these lessons in the slideshow because I couldn’t the screenshots weren’t loading Thank you Google Slides for glitching on it. I will show you Two examples of descriptions and simple is, is usually, it’s usually better. And the other thing, the last thing I want to say is that in the author community, we have a lot of different like lingo that we use to describe things, early access, bonus content, et cetera, in any community, we’re going to have ways in which we communicate with each other as creative people. And, and it’s important we have that because it kind of takes down the barriers of, you know, you’re in your world, creating this amazing, incredible fantasy novel, and then you’re in your world, creating maybe a cozy mystery. And how do we bridge that gap and work together? We’re going to probably start speaking in like the shared language, but the shared language is not one that readers oftentimes have with us. So when we use words like early access, we use words like bonus content. A lot of readers just think to themselves. What? What is this? And when I say tell them what they are getting early access to, I mean Be specific about you’re getting this book 30 days before the rest of the world gets it. Meaning this book What is the actual title of the story? Are they familiar with that title? If not, maybe drop in what the genre of the book is or a sentence about it. If it’s bonus content There’s so many different kinds of bonus content. Maybe be specific about is it character profiles? Is it going to be you know, closed door scenes that might not be You know, in the rest of the book, it’s up to you what these benefits are, but getting specific about one benefit rather than vague about five benefits is the key to a successful subscription. So simple, simple, simple. And I hope that elucidates a little bit about how to be simple. This slide, I have a feeling, um, I’m going to talk a little bit very deeply about. So bear with me here because this is so important. Um, the lesson. Is that subscriptions really are sustainable and this lesson, I’m actually going to tell you how to materialize right, but this is just the aggregate data. I can’t tell you individual data about individual authors and I actually think aggregate data in some cases is helpful and I think this aggregate data is really interesting. Which is that after nine months, the average basically author on rain has 90 percent to 100 percent net revenue retention, which. Harkening back to our last slide. This is an example of um, business lingo that not oftentimes all of us creative people understand and I’m going to demystify this business lingo because NRR is a little weird. Net revenue retention is a little weird. What does this mean? So if we have like a hundred people who let’s say join a high school class on, you know, the year 2020. The net revenue retention, I’m using quotes here, but this is a very easy thing to imagine. There’s like, you know, maybe a thousand people in that graduating class. It’s a big high school. My high school had about a thousand graduating students. I’m from the South. There’s a lot of big high schools in the South, Friday Night Lights, right? So you’ve got like a thousand students per grade, right? And that next year, you’re going to have new students come in. So if you’re looking at the total number of students in the high school, you’re going to have, you know, new students come in the next year, you’ll have some graduate and you’ll have that total high school number of maybe 4, 000 students. Right. But if you want to see the health of the students in that grade, how are they performing? Are they getting on to the next grade? You’re going to want to look at. How many people have maintained their standing in school, are still in school, from that specific grade? And this is kind of what we’d call like a graduation rate, right? Um, so maybe the high school has a 90 percent graduation rate, maybe it has a 70 percent graduation rate, maybe it has a 95 percent graduation rate. That, in a way, is an analogy for retention, right? Because you’re looking at a specific group of people, that specific class, and looking at how they stick with school over time. When you think about it in subscription terms, bringing it into this world, what we’re thinking about is a group of readers who come into your subscription on a specific window of time, let’s say in the month of January, and how do those readers who joined in January stick with you over a period of time? Does that make sense? That’s what retention looks at specifically net revenue retention. So we’re looking at the number. of dollars that retain over time. Maybe you have a group of 10 readers who join in January and they’re paying you 100 a month collectively, right? So that would be an average of 10 per reader. What we then see on READ is that after nine months, that group of readers, on average, it’s the aggregate stats on the platform, some authors obviously overperform, some underperform. That group of ten readers who signed up on month one, on average by month nine, which in this case would be October if they joined in January, are paying 100 to 90, somewhere between 90 and 100, which means it’s pretty sustainable. And we see that be pretty sticky. Hopefully that makes sense by what net revenue retention is. I want to talk a little bit more about some of the data we found and then how to apply it to your own business. So after three months, we see most of this drop off happen in a cohort. So let’s take this same group of people who joined in January. And what we normally see happen is that. They’re really evil unsubscribe, but they’re going to probably unsubscribe in the first three months, meaning that by the time April comes around for that January cohort for the that group of or class of readers who’s joined, you even could train people as a class depending on the month they come in. We see that that drop off basically levels out and that between months three and six. There’s usually not much drop off. There’s not much action in that cohort, but then once we get to month seven, something funny starts to happen specifically month seven through nine, where we’ll see readers who originally maybe dropped off in the first three months, actually start to what we call reactivate their subscription. So re subscribe, right? Maybe they canceled sometime in April. Well, they’re going to be back in October, but we also see readers who’ve been there the whole time upgrade. So maybe they were at a 10 tier. Now they’re at a 20 tier. And this is why we see net revenue retention between 90 percent and 100%. That is exactly why. Because we have readers who are dropping off, but some of them are coming back. And for the ones who haven’t come back, the ones who are upgrading make up for that lost revenue. So why do I mention this metric in specific? Because I think oftentimes we’re thinking about the wrong metric as authors. I would much rather have 20 percent of my subscribers leave At the end of the month, they’re gone. I lost them forever, but know that I’m keeping the 80 percent who really want to be there and potentially that a portion of that group is even going to upgrade to a higher tier over time. That to me is something that I’d be really interested in. And that’s why this net revenue retention number is really interesting and also really cool to know. So now that we have these numbers, this data, I want to share in just 60 seconds, how you can make the most of this. Because remember, this is the average, you can beat this. So the first thing I would say is that it is really important to have a somewhat high ish barrier to entry for your subscription. So 5 I would really recommend being the entry level tier price because we see a lot of readers join at that tier price and never Leave, right? So there’s some readers who you’re not going to be able to get to upgrade. They’re what we call inactive Subscriptions and you might be wondering how I have data on this because reams only been around for nine months and the answer is and We’re working with authors on patreon who are moving to ream We’re able to see that billing history oftentimes because when we’re in the migration process, we’re literally like it’s a full service that we’re helping bring them over. We’re studying the history of their subscription and we’re trying to get their net revenue retention as high as possible. And what we’ll see is that a certain portion of the subscribers are inactive. They don’t respond to emails. They don’t even check their subscription. They’re just being billed. Right. And that’s kind of a secret of the subscription model. Are these inactive subscribers? And it’s not a small number. The longer that a subscription has been around, the higher the inactive subscribers. But we’re finding is that if a subscription has been around less than a year, there’s usually only like 5 percent who are inactive. But if a subscription has been around for three years, we’ll see 20 percent inactive. And the subscription has been around for five years. We’ll see up to 40 percent inactive, which means that like over time, there’s more and more readers who are subscribed, but not. Very active in terms of their usage of that subscription, which means that they’re not going to upgrade. They’re just staying there So if you wanted to maximize a subscription to be like a long term we’re talking 10 20 year recurring revenue stream for you That’s what you would do and the best example of a business that’s done. This very effectively is cable television, right? They cable television was not is not cheap now. I’m not saying charge 100 month your subscription, right? you’ll get readers noticing that and It’s, it’s not about ripping people off, but there’s a huge difference between three and five dollars for you. Huge difference and I’m telling you that there’s gonna be readers who stick around forever and don’t leave. So would you rather that reader paying you three dollars a month or paying you five dollars a month to support you? They can cancel any time, but a lot of them won’t cancel. So what would you prefer? I think there’s a huge, huge reason to do 5. But the other thing that I’ll say that is really, really important is this notion of a retention point, right? We now know that in the first 90 days, if you get someone to stick around, they’re probably going to stay. So how do you build trust with the new reader in the first 90 days? Consistency, being able to potentially Reach out to them personally. We’ve seen like a personal note, if you have like an automation, um, that if you’re bringing the emails of your readers who are in your room to an email provider and going, Hey, you know, after I add them to the sequence, 30 days later, send them an email that says, Hey, I hope you’re doing well. I hope you’re enjoying the subscription so far. Just these simple things of showing someone that you care about them goes a really long way because people want to be cared for people want to Just be heard know that like this creator isn’t forgetting about me know this creator cares about their audience That is a huge huge thing and just these little little touches can help boost your attention by like let’s call it 5 percent which might Not seem significant, but over the long run compounded over every single month that could double the size of your subscription in three or four Years time which again we’re thinking long term here But that’s what subscriptions are about. Recurring sustainable revenue. And that’s why lesson number two is that subscriptions really are sustainable. The caveat is, if you make it sustainable. Now, lesson number three, this is my last big lesson, before I go into some takeaways, and then we’ll open up to just questions. So, lesson number three is that, descriptions can make a significant chunk of an author’s income. So, um, what we typically see is that, it can be right around 25 percent if an author is also monetizing on retailers. crowdfunding other platforms. This isn’t always. Some authors make more from subscriptions. Amelia Rose, she indexes pretty heavily on subscriptions. She’s at like the 40 to 45 percent mark usually. Um, some other authors also are heavy in subscriptions in the beginning or it’s a big stage of their career. Um, but 25 percent for an established author tends to be what it is. Um, and If you’re less than that, that’s okay. I think there’s room for you to potentially grow if you’re at that level. Um, then I think you can feel pretty good about it. That doesn’t mean you can’t do better, but that’s a pretty good sign. But how does this all work? Like how do you get this whole ecosystem working together? Right. That’s what I want to talk about now. So actually today in the Facebook group, I shared an update that was like always true, but we never like actually shared with people and now I want to like. I guess, encourage folks that this is possible because again, subscriptions are part of your business. They’re not going to be your whole business. That’s just the truth. And it’s a good thing because not all your fans are going to subscribe. Some fans are going to want to buy a la carte. Some fans are going to want to support, you know, a crowdfund and some fans are going to prefer subscriptions. But how do you get these ecosystems working together? So, what we’ve seen is that whether it’s bringing the crowdfunding, crowding the ream, or crowding the retailers, retailers ream, there’s a whole, it depends on the circle you want to go in. And I could literally give an hour talk just on that. Getting them talking so that readers know, this is why I’m here, if I want to go, you know, support them in this way, or get access to this type of content I’m going to hear, is important. So, what we allow authors to do, is if you’re running a Kickstarter, right, And you’re having a crowdfunding campaign. If you want to offer, let’s say, a promotion code to join your Ream, to get several months off your Ream for free, maybe it’s one month, you’re able to do that as an add on to a tier. So maybe anyone who supports you at your audiobook tier level, maybe that’s 15, I’m just throwing numbers out there, they also get a month free to your Ream subscription. But maybe if they join the 50 tier, they get the signed book and three months free to your Ream subscription. It’s up to you how you want to do it, but this is how you get these systems working together, so that you can turn a crowdfunder into a paid subscriber. And then likewise, you know, there’s something like your subscription on Reem. Maybe a book that you’re offering early access to becomes a special signed edition that you put up on Kickstarter, right? And then those subscribers can turn into crowdfund people. Now, same thing with the retailers, right? The book that you offer early access in Ream becomes a novel on the retailers. Maybe that novel on the retailers eventually goes on to your backlist on Ream that’s exclusive to people at a specific tier. Do you see how you get all these systems working together? That’s what the best authors in subscriptions are doing. They’re viewing subscriptions as a way to enhance and supercharge their ecosystem. And as an author, like, That’s huge because now you get your readers be able to boost your income, you get to sell directly to them, and be able to have all these revenue streams working together. And we even see this too with how an author treats following on a platform like Ring. A lot of authors now I’m beginning to utilize it similar to like a newsletter community type space. And this makes upgrading easier for readers. And what we oftentimes see is a conversion rate of 10 to one from followers to paid members. Sometimes that varies, sometimes it’s higher, sometimes it’s lower, but that’s what we’re seeing. And that’s pretty cool. So these are my three lessons. And what I want to share as my final slide here of what I have for you in terms of my million dollar subscription lessons are that trust is the currency subscriptions. And this also goes through for all business. And at the end of the day, if your readers are not trusting you for whatever reason that is, then they’re probably not going to want to subscribe to you because subscriptions commitment, they need to know that you’re going to follow through on whatever you say in the future. This is why under promising and over delivering is huge. It’s key. And it’s also why going back to our first lesson, simple is better because it’s easier. To under promise and over deliver on something simple than something complicated with a lot of different benefits and what we see oftentimes in terms of retention with authors, is that the authors with the highest drop off typically are the authors who are promising the most because they’re not able to keep up with it and then we actually get complaints from readers. So, really important. The next one is that consistency is key, right? This makes sense with anything. If it’s a subscription, especially, readers are coming back over a period of time, readers are going to be paying you consistently, they might be expecting or at least wanting something consistent. Okay. But the biggest point here is that you get to define what consistency means for you. We don’t see a correlation between you have to drop the chapter on the same day of the week and the same time and any sort of retention or gain and pay subscriptions. Now, if you say you’re going to drop at a specific date and time of the week, you better do that. Because we do see a correlation when authors don’t live up to their promises in a drop off from retention. Likewise, if an author is living up to their promises, we typically see retention at these healthy numbers that we’ve talked about that 90 to a hundred percent never. revenue retention mark after nine months. I only say nine months because Ream has only been public for like nine full months now. So I don’t have more data on that. We’re like entering month 10 now in terms of like a full business month. Now, the next thing is that there’s no one way to have the subscription. This is so important. There are hundreds of authors succeeding in subscriptions. And if we were to add up the number of authors who I would say are making like decent income, whether it’s a couple thousand dollars, 10, 000 a year, or even up to 100, 000 a year, that number is approaching a thousand fiction authors. But compared to the global market of fiction authors, that is quite small, right? There’s tens of thousands of fiction authors who are making money in fiction. Thousands who are likely making a living. Might even be close to that 10, 000 number. We’re gonna look globally, right? So subscriptions are a small part of the overall market. So we could sometimes get kind of tricked into thinking. Oh, because we don’t have someone who’s doing exactly what we’re doing, then it won’t be successful. And that you might have to copy, or, no, you’re not copying, because that’s not what we’re trying to do, but we might have to imitate what others are doing that might not really work for us, because no one else is doing it. But this is weird and uncomfortable, but it’s also true. No one is going to write your story. It’s your story. No one’s going to create your subscription. It’s yours. And you know, when we’re on a retailer or when we’re trying to put ourselves into a very much, you know, one size fits all model, then it kind of becomes like, well, I guess we package ourselves the same. I guess we have the same, that’s the same that, and don’t get me wrong. There are benefits to having familiarities. There are benefits to, you know, giving readers what they expect. But your readers might be different from another author’s readers. And what you want to give them, and what’s sustainable for you, might look different from another author. So you don’t have to be a serial fiction author to succeed in subscriptions. Although we’re going to talk a little bit more about serials and subscriptions in just a minute. You don’t have to be, you know, writing a book a month, or writing romance, or writing science fiction to make it in subscriptions. What you have to do is be consistent, has to be sustainable for you, and you have to start simple. And this is where I like to talk about time to first dollar. This is like a weird kind of like metric. I call it TTFD. But it hopefully shapes how you think about things in a very different way. The beauty of subscription is to make money as you write. Make money as you develop things, right? Um, you know, think about the businesses that traditionally are run in subscription. You have software, you know, software releases. And imagine if like we waited to complete Ream until the end. Now, Ream is free for authors to use. But we technically are a subscription business, right? We make money when readers pay subscriptions to authors on the platform, right? And that is by nature a subscription business. So Ream is a subscription business. Imagine if we waited to release Ream as a product until it was finished, like completely finished, whatever that means. That would be like five to six years of development. And also we’d probably do much poorer job developing it because we would have no feedback. So again, that’s the game of software. Storytelling is different, but How different is it? Should you really wait and build up your whole series for six years of development before you put it into your subscription? I think we can all agree that’s probably too much, but where is the line? Where is the line? I would say with subscription, starting earlier and trying to get money in faster is the key because you’re trying to develop and deliver those benefits as you’re creating the story, as you’re creating the world, as you’re creating the book box, as you’re creating the special edition, as you’re creating the bonus content, whatever it is that you’re creating in your subscription. The beauty of it is being able to get to that first dollar faster. So challenge would be how fast can you get to your first dollar in your description, just that first dollar, that first subscriber to start getting paid money from it, to start making it, you know, maybe not worth your time on day one, getting there. That first dollar is huge. Now, the last point I want to make is that you can always make changes, even big ones. This is super important to remember your subscription is not forever in the sense that it’s the same thing always again Imagine if you subscribe to a software platform that never made any changes or updates, that’d be pretty lame Imagine if you were watching a television show That never had its plot evolved. Or, maybe a creator, a specific director that you like, that never created a new show. An actor that never did anything new. They just were that one character forever. It’s hard. Change is hard. But, it’s essential. Not only can you make changes, it’s expected that you make changes, even big ones, like switching up the genre you’re writing. All you have to be careful about these things. Certainly switching up the series, switching up the cadence of the benefits you’re offering. Amelia Rose has changed a ton about her subscription in the last couple years. She’s releasing less content now to be more sustainable. She’s added new tiers like book boxes. She’s added new media formats and also pivoted the series she’s writing to not just write PNR, but also write Mafia and other things she’s interested in. She still has a great subscription and has been able to be at that six figure level now for four going on five years straight. So it’s possible and I just want to remind you that that’s not forever. So with all this, this is kind of my three lessons on a million dollars learning subscriptions. And I hope that regardless of your next step in your subscription journey that this has helped for you and that this is something you can take away and make your entire author career better. But I just want to mention I know many of you are here because you’re interested And taking your description to the next level now. And if you are, we have cohort three of the six figure description, author accelerator, which has opened as of yesterday and we opened for the next two weeks and six years. Good. Another accelerator is basically an experience where you get a course taught by me and Amelia. And then you get access to four live sessions with a small group, small team of people, fellow authors, you get personal feedback on your tiers and able to start launch and grow your description together. It’s an awesome, awesome experience. And we went live with that. And we also went live with what we’re calling the ultimate subscription author bundle, which includes. a new course that Amelia and Ariel, who Ariel is the head of the accelerator now, she helps run it all so that she can give you all lots of personal time and attention. And in addition to that is also a developmental editor. So she’s really great at knowing what makes a great story. Her and Amelia, who Amelia has had 70 million story views on online platforms came together to create a serial course, which also has. a similar, what we’re calling a lab, which has four live sessions, including intensive feedback, up to 5, 000 words of a story critique of yours, that you’re not just taking the course, but actually improving your writing and getting real feedback and also meeting other authors in similar genres as you throughout it. So it’s a really, really great program. We’ve put a lot of time and energy into it and has all 24 hours. So we’re excited. And I want to share that with you all. And what I’ll do now is just quickly walk through the landing page. I had some graphics for it, but clearly the graphics aren’t loading in my slideshow provider. But what’s great is that everything you need to know is on the landing pages. So I want to show that to you and then open up the rest of this time. For, I think a lot of you came here to have questions about the programs. So if you have questions about the programs, I’m here to answer it, but also if you have questions about descriptions in general, um, I’ll answer those too, so I’ll make sure to share my screen and I’m literally showing you the experience that any student, um, slash perspective author in the program would see. Um, this is exactly what you’ll see. And if you go to like learn. subscriptionsforauthors. com, this is where we host our courses. So you can find them all here. We have the bundle, which includes everything. And then we have the individual accelerator and the individual lab. And I’m just going to go to the bundle page, not because you need to buy the bundle, but because it has everything we need on it in terms of what you get in each individual course. And really the whole goal for this experience was to create and put all the knowledge that we’ve shared. We’ve shared literally like a hundred hours of YouTube videos you can find on our YouTube channel. We’ve shared, you know, 70 podcasts, a dozen of vlogs. put all of it in there in a streamlined, simple way, so that you can get everything you need to know to take your description to the next level. And there’s 70 sessions and 10 hours of video specifically in the description course. Then we have the Accelerator itself, which is the live sessions. We take it so seriously that there’s not just one way to have a subscription that we don’t want to tell you, you know, here’s the course and here’s what you can do. Choose your own adventure and not give you help on actually implementing what is best for you. So that’s where the Accelerator comes in. You have office hours with me and Amelia every month where you can ask us questions and you also get some bonus resources including access to a thousand different subscription authors who are succeeding in subscriptions. It’s a spreadsheet that includes links. to all their descriptions. Then you also get access to the virtual summit. Um, that’s in the accelerator. If you choose to do the bundle, you get access to all of it, but the serial course specifically has the serial course. It’s 30 sessions, five hours of live video. It’s, it’s awesome. Um, I learned so much while taking it because I myself haven’t written a serial before. It’s why I’m not a teacher in that course. Um, but you learn a lot and Amelia. She’s written quite a few serials. So she is a great, great lead teacher for that along with Ariel. Then there’s the lab, and this I’m super excited for. Um, it’s basically group mentorship. I’m taking your first serial from zero to thousands of readers and beyond. And we’re going to be talking about your, reviewing your blurb, viewing your cover, um, your description. We’re going to be talking about. everything from what genres you target, the platforms you should go after, the specific strategies, and working with a team of authors who are doing that, as well. Right. And then there’s going to be actual feedback on your story, so that you can write those first few episodes or chapters that really grab your readers in. And i want to be super clear here, that The reason that we expand into serials is because so many authors who have subscriptions already are doing serials and Amelia has a ton of experience in serials, you do not have to do a serial to have a special description, you do not, that’s why they’re separate programs if you want to have both it’s beautiful and that work well, that’s why we created the bundle too, but you do not have to do serials to be successful subscriptions. Likewise, serials, the course doesn’t cover subscriptions that much because it’s more about craft. And we go into other business models that you can have with serials, including paper chapter, repurposing your serials under retailers. So they’re more complimentary rather than, you know, And it depends if it’s complimentary for you. It’s not complimentary for everyone. Um, so we have the story critique, and then there’s office hours with Amelia and Ariel. So, that’s it. Um, one thing I’ll answer up front, before I stop sharing my screen, and go into like just two cool Ream authors, is that you do not have to be in the Serial Lab and Accelerator at the same time. You can purchase the bundle, and then do the Serial Lab. Live sessions first and then the accelerator later, or you can do both at the same time. They are an alternating week. So if you want to do the live sessions at the same time, you can. It’s designed that way, but you don’t have to. Likewise, you also have lifetime access to all the live sessions and recordings of all the live sessions too for this cohort and all future cohorts. So in short, it’s a choose your own adventure as always, and we trust you to do what’s best for you and are always here to help and answer questions, which I’ll be doing in just a minute. But before I do that, I wanted to switch topic and show you two. Authors and show you their subscriptions. And both of these authors are involved in the accelerator, the subscription accelerator. Um, and Amelia, of course herself is here and you’ve probably seen her page before, but it’s just cool to kind of see that like Amelia’s scripts, pretty simple at that 5 tier, she’s giving weekly updates. That’s all she’s doing. And she links out to the specific stories she’s giving weekly updates too. So that if a reader gets to her subscription, gets her tier, isn’t ready to buy yet, they can at least start reading some of these steamy one shots, the breeding cave, um, and these stories she has. That next here, right, is just the entire backlist and they get extra early access. She’s not, you know, adding an extra 10 benefits here. Then there’s the Redwood girl gang. This is where you’re getting some art prints. That’s really the main thing there. And then it’s hidden, but the 50 tier is a book box tier. And that’s what she has with her subscription here. And on reams, she’s been able to grow subscription over the last year on the platform from about 700 members to 900 members. She has two other subscriptions and audio and a comment subscription. This is just her ebook slash book box subscription. So hopefully that gives you an idea of what’s possible, and just behind the scenes of like, and Amelia’s even shared this publicly, she’s been able to increase the price that her readers are paying her over the course of the last few years, where her readers now, after years of hanging out with New Tears, are paying her three or four times more than they were on average when she first started. Partially when she first started, she was underpricing herself. She was releasing like 10 chapters a week at three dollars a month. So, you know. Over time she’s upped her prices and she’s also created these new tiers. So this is just to show you like in action, like again, it’s intimidating when you look at someone like Amelia and how far she’s gotten, but it is quite simple and you don’t need to be offering book boxes and art prints in your backlist on day one. You just need to start out with one tier and one thing. Another person I want to show you, um, because he was a team lead and he accelerated this last cohort. It’s amazing, is Xavier Guts. His is a little bit more going on, which is what I see most authors have. And I love David. So I’m not picking on him, but just showing you that he, he didn’t take the simple thing to heart, but he’s not a serial author. He writes on retailers. He’s a horror author and he has a great subscription. He’s focused on building his community. He doesn’t show his follower member count public, but he does great. He’s a great, great guy. And, um, you know what you’re getting here too, you know, ebook monthly ebook he’s producing. Getting access to the community, getting access to all previous seasons of The Nightmare Edge, and it looks like a lot, but it’s really not that complicated, right? And he also gives them some early access to new books, but that’s what he’s offering here. And if I was David, I’d bump this from 3 to 5. I don’t control author’s pricing. Love David. Um, but regardless, like, you know, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. There’s so many different submission models that work. What I just showed you, between Amelia and David, are two completely different worlds. Two worlds in which there probably isn’t much overlap in these readers. But that’s okay, because it’s your readers, it’s your world, it’s your subscription. And it’s about figuring out what works for you. And I won’t pretend that that’s easy, but it’s definitely not hard. The biggest thing between a successful subscription and where you are now, oftentimes, is just getting started. So I hope today helps you get started. For the rest of today, I’ll be here to answer your questions. So I’ll stop sharing my screen, and I’ll go to the chat, and feel free to leave some more questions in the chat. So let me open up. Um, Jamie, excited to see you there. Um, Alyssa, great to have you here. I’m excited to see you too. Um, question from Karen. I need to keep my time. I was looking at the accelerated course, how much of his life. So the only part that’s live are the four like team sessions that you have. You can also go to recordings for, um, so it’s just four hours that are alive over the course of eight weeks. Um, the rest is all pre recorded. The only part that’s live is the one. One on like five, 10 people that will be in your group. So it depends on how many people show up. We typically have the teams around 10 or 12 people. And then usually like seven or eight actually show up live. Um, so that’s typically the average that we see. Um, and yeah, the actual time that’s live is not teaching. It’s feedback, CUNY group coaching. Um, so it’s a little bit different in that sense that the course is recorded, but the group coaching is live because doing asynchronous group coaching would be really tough, but we’re a big believer in that. You know, the course is just the beginning. There has to be personal feedback. There has to be something. And the thing that, you know, is able to be work and stable for us is to do like a group coaching model and then office hours individually with me and Amelia. So that’s how we do it. Um, I’m not quite ready. I’m thinking Q3. Um, when will this be available again? Um, that’s a great question. Um, I know we’re going to do it again in the summer and the fall. So hopefully that gives you some insight. Um, I, so we should be doing it in Q3 again. Um, I, we have this year mapped out. I can’t make any promises about 2025, but we will or will not be doing, but we definitely, this isn’t the only time to get in this year. Um, we just open it up because literally we do have a component where you place people on teams and we can only have it so often. But, um, we, this won’t be the only time. Um, Des says, I just want to know your opinion. Do you think I can handle doing the lab plus the 3. 0? It’s well, I should say this. The reason why we created the bundle the way we did is because we wanted to give people access to all the content. And whenever you want to do the live sessions, you’re able to basically reserve a spot in a future. Like if you don’t want to be part of the live sessions for this cohort, you’ll still get the email updates, but you can then in a future cohort, be part of those live sessions, right? I honestly, if you do both, it’s only going to be one hour of a team meeting a week, if you do both, if you do one, it’s one hour every other week. That’s actually live. Um, and it’s not required to show up, but I think you really should. Um, it’ll be at a time that works best for you. We like group the times together based on when people are around. So. It is pretty manageable, but it is a commitment, right? Like if you were doing both at the same time, you would really, if you want to make the most of the progress through it, know that you can put in four to five hours every week into the material, the learning and the application, probably like one and a half ish hours of watching the courses. One hour of live sessions and then, you know, one, one and a half hours to two of actually doing the thing, whether it’s the writing, the subscription, et cetera. Um, if you’re doing just one, you can do like four to five hours every other week and still make good progress, right? So you can kind of have off weeks, you can have a week where you get a lot in. If you’re doing both, it’s a little bit more intense, but it’s probably like the equivalent to like, you know, a true like semester class, right? It’s. Just a little bit, you know, but you could also take it spread out on your own time, anytime. Um, and you have lifetime access to the course. We have so many people, too, who go to the live sessions, get so much from it, but haven’t started the course yet until after live sessions. Um, there’s people who, you know, take the live sessions, meet their team, get their foundation started, then they go take the course. Then they’ll actually go to the office hours and get some time with me and Amelia months later. Um, and that’s great. You can do that. Um, so it is kind of structured like a choose your own adventure because I don’t think there’s like one way to learn or one way that works best for you. But I would say this, that if you think you’re going to want to do both courses at some point, um, once you go in, like the best price is the bundle. Um, once, once you’re in, there is a discount to getting the second course. Once you’re already in. But it’s not the discount that the bundle is. Um, so the bundle is the best price you’ll get, get it at. Um, so if you know, you’re going to do both, that’s great. But if you know, you’re only going to do one right now and you’re not completely sure about the other one, like I said, there’s no worries. Um, then I would just take that one and you could always do that other one later. Um, so that’s. It’s tough. I think you know best, but there’s a lot of different pathways to succeed and take these classes and, and make the most of it. And I’ve taken a lot of courses. So as Amelia, I’ve actually helped out behind the scenes with a lot of courses that probably a lot of, you know, in the author space and have nothing but respect for them. Um, and we just wanted to take our area that we love and try and incorporate a lot of what’s best about a lot of these different programs. Um, so. For Alexa, how strong will the focus on craft be? Will it be useful if one is looking to expand the sales further while already wide? I mean, I, I think it’s designed for, for that. Like we have a big focus on repurposing retailer novels into, um, into a serial that could be, you know, going wide and serial platforms could funnel into something like a subscription. Um, And I would say like about 40 to 50 percent of the actual video materials are explicitly craft. The other 50 percent are marketing, packaging, release, and stuff about platforms. That’s a pretty large focus. And in terms of the live sessions, about half of that will be focused on craft too. So the course is half focused on craft, half focused on growing. Um, and I think the craft is super important because if you don’t have strong craft, no matter what you do to grow, it’s not going to. work as well as if you had a great story. So we’re really trying to help with both. So I’d say it’s split, um, to answer your question. It’s split pretty evenly. Um, but they’re also integrated too, right? In the sense of like, you can’t do one without the other, which is why they’re both there together. Because, you know, it’s one thing to have a course all about craft, but if you don’t teach someone how to grow with that, then it’s like, okay, great. I have this awesome story, but what do I do with it? Um, so both are there with the serials for sure. Um, oh yeah, if you, um, I can make sure that we send you the bundle because it’s open now for sure. Um, uh, so one course is 4. 99, both individual courses 4. 99, the bundle for both together is 7. 99. So you’re right, Debbie. So if you want to get either individual course, whether it’s a serial course, subscription course, it’s 4. 99. It’s 7. 99 to get them both together, if you want them together. Um, right, so that’s how that works. Um, doo doo doo. Um, and the bundle itself, we’ve limited the number of people because the payment plan specifically for the bundle is like, technically, if you do the payment plan for the bundle, it’s less than the payment plan per month. Um for the individual cohorts, but it extends for 12 months So the payment plan for the bundle is 79 for 12 months and the payment plan for the individual course is 99 for six months um, I Really think you should only spend money that you have on any course But if breaking it up is helpful to you, um breaking it up for the bundle is very generous Which is why we’ve limited the number of people in that bundle because uh There’s that’s it’s good. It’s good. Um, we’re trying to make it easy for you guys again if you want to, um, so that the summit. The, the summit’s not taught by me and Amelia, the summit’s not a course. The summit’s just like when you go to a conference, you get keynotes from people. It’ll be awesome. People are gonna be great, but it’s not, um, two different things. And um, we’re, we’re very happy to offer the summit. We think it’s gonna be a ton of fun, but it’s just different. Like you’re gonna hear from. A lot of amazing people, but they’re not going to be walking you through like an eight hours, like exactly what you need to do with your subscription. It’s going to be more like, this is what I did to be successful. This is what I did to be successful. So it’s super cool. And if you want, you can see online on YouTube. We did a free virtual summit in 2023. Um, that gives you a really good idea of like how the paid summit will go. In fact, we have the summit. Um, like if you go to the bottom of the summit landing page. Um, we linked that YouTube playlist so you can watch the first summit we ever did. The second summit is going to be very similar. Um, and the main like thing we did at the summit was to have it like, the first goal was to do it in person. We wanted to bring people for an in person conference. People wanted to get together, have like a small community event. Um, We now, um, have a virtual component because so many people ask for it and we want to make it accessible, but yeah, it’s one’s a conference, one’s a class. So they’re, they’re kind of two different things. Um, and it’s up to you if you want both or one, but if you take the class, you get access to the summit. Um, so, um, the subscription class gets access summit, the bundle gets access to the summit, um, for the virtual, and then you get a discount for the in person summit, um, which the in person summit. It’s coming up fast, so I don’t, I mean, y’all might want to, like, that’s coming up really soon, so if you did have, want to make those travel plans, um, let me know, but, um, all of it’s really just about, again, choose your own adventure, we try and provide everything that could possibly work for an author, including, you know, the podcast, the newsletter, the book, any way that an author could want to get, um, access to education, access to advice, we, we try and provide it to you. So the, if you paid the virtual summit, I will, if you do do the courses, um, just send an email to me and I’ll, and I’ll refund you once we go through the back end after the whole cohorts done, I’ll be able to tell people who double paid too. So if you forget, don’t worry about it, but I’ll, I’ll just refund you for the virtual summit so that you. You know, are in double pay. So don’t, don’t worry about it. Um, but if you know ahead of time too, um, I’m very happy to like create like a coupon code for you that would give you that off on, um, the summit. We’re not like trying to pressure people to like come into the course unless they really want it. So we’re not like telling all the people, Hey, like, you know, we’re like, we’re just trying to like, you know, be very fair about it. So if someone comes into the summit, already bought the summit and then wants the course too, we will honor that. Um, but you know, We haven’t like sent out a whole like things, especially to that, the summit people saying, um, that if you upgrade to the course, because it just feels a little pushy to me, it just isn’t comfortable for me from a marketing perspective. So I am known to go on the backend and get people refunds. Like I’ve done this all the time when we do things that, Oh, if you buy it in the package, which is not, um, for instance, we’ve done this with the summit already. Um, so don’t, don’t worry, we’ll check it out in the backend. We’ll make sure no one overpays for anything. And, uh, I myself am very particular about, like, when and how I like to mention things to people. Um, because I think marketing in general, this is like a piece of advice, is all about, like, what energizes you. Like, it energizes me talking to people. It energizes me telling stories. I am energized by creating content. But I’m really not that energized by writing, like, tons and tons of different sales emails. Or tons and tons of different upsells and discounts. Or just trying to get people into things. It’s not what energizes me. Um, Personally, I’m sure that like, you know, if we did it just like if you did it, maybe it would work out better for you. But in the long run, I think that the best thing is doing what’s sustainable for you. So if it’s not sustainable for you, you know, contacting different lists of your readers and trying to upsell them on this and upsell them on that. Um, don’t worry about it. Like, you know, life will work out. The best thing you can do is provide like a great story to your readers and that’s what we focus on, providing a great experience and great education to you all. Um, so that, that’s just how I think about it. It’s why, you know, we didn’t jam out a million different emails. I just look at the back of it. I’m like, okay, um, this person paid for both. They’re getting a refund. Um, hopefully that makes sense. The other virtual, yes, the virtual is included for the in person summit. Um, for, for the in person summit, I’m basically giving, uh, off to anyone who bought the subscription course or who buys the subscription course, a hundred dollars off, so you’ll pay one 50 because I’m going to give you, you already got the virtual summit for free and I’m giving you a further video discount. Um, so that’s how that works. And I suppose, suppose at some point. I mean, now that I’m hearing you all are interested, I’m like, Oh, I guess I should mention it, but it’s like, I just feel bad. It’s like, you know, it’s like, ah, like you’re already supporting the course. Like, do you, you know, if you want everything, you can have it all. So I suppose if you do want everything, I will let you, I’ll make that easy for you. Um, we, um, sent out emails initially when we launched the summit to the people, but I guess if you’re new to the accelerator or just got in, you may have missed that email. Although I know the person asking, you’re awesome. You probably got the email, but it’s okay. I can remind you again about it. Um, uh, let’s see. Can you send the course to the summit if you already paid the virtual summit? Okay. Okay. Okay. I’m just trying to get all the questions, everyone. Um, do either of the courses cover info on hosting stories or selling merch books on your own website? This is a great question. So in general, the courses are not, uh, tutorials for two reasons. One is that, um, we don’t believe that tutorials, like specific, like how to’s on tech, um, should be paid for. Um, so a lot of different sites have tutorials themselves and help guides. Um, and this isn’t to shade anyone who like, It prioritizes like this tutorial being the part of their paid course, but like, I just don’t think that’s fair. We run a software platform for authors, um, and like, I would feel really bad if someone came to me and is like, I really want to use Ream, but you know, I can’t afford your course or, you know, it’s not for me right now. And I can’t use Ream as a result. It’s like, no, no, no, you can use Ream. We’re here to help you. We have a support team in terms of the software. If you’re using your own, you know, software on your own website. Um, they probably have a good team. If they’re a good platform, they probably have teams too to help you with like, Hey, how do I press? You know, how do I publish here? How do I schedule here? The course is less about the how to and more, how can you implement things specifically and be successful? Because let’s face it, on any of these platforms, millions of authors have uploaded their books to Amazon, but very few actually make serious money on Amazon. This, all these programs are about. Yeah, millions of authors upload their books to Wattpad and serial platforms. But how many actually are writing great CLAs that do successful? Much fewer. We want to help you get to those fewer. And that is even less about the information being the magic. There’s lots of great information of course, truly. But it’s why we Make sure that like the live sessions are part of it too. And that the coaching is part of it and the office hours, because it’s also about that access to how can we sit down and help you personally. Right. So I think that’s kind of just our philosophy around it. Um, and helps to explain like that. Yeah. You’ve, do you take the course, you will know everything you need to think through marketing, scaling, starting, and setting up your business on any platform that you choose to use. It does not matter the platform you use. We do not care. You will not be once pressured into using a specific platform. And to be fair, I try not even to pressure people into using Reem, which is another funny thing because I’m sure we could, you know, grow faster if I did a whole sales arm and told others, please join now, please join now. But I don’t do that because I’m just so focused on creating like. And actually better platform and trust that people will use what’s best. Um, and if that’s not us, it’s not us. Um, likewise, I feel the same way about the course. Likewise, I, um, you know, when it comes to these tutorials, don’t want to pressure people into using a specific platform. Um, so with that said, if you have questions about how to set up your website, like specific tech questions, we are always happy to direct you to help guys, many of our team has already used things like that, and we can help you with that. Um, but. You know, the course isn’t going to give you like a WordPress meets memberful integration, um, guide. In fact, you can see all the lessons on the landing page. So it’s not a surprise. You can see every single lesson in the course at the bottom of the landing page, everything in there. And it’s a lot of amazing stuff, but none of it’s like a walkthrough of X platform. I think you can go to X platforms website and get those guides completely for free. But you can’t get for free is how can you make all this work and be successful for you? And that’s why we’re here. So I hope that helps answer your question. In short. I think it’ll be very helpful for you if you’re on your own. So I encourage you to use that if you think it’s the best solution for you. And if anything, you’re going to get a view of exactly what and how you can plug and play things into your website to work best for you rather than just our like single handed recommendations. Because on some of these things we might be biased and I’m very wary of that and just want to make sure that that bias doesn’t affect how we’re teaching the broader community to be successful. Um, the courses start in April. So April and May are the live sessions, but you get instant access. Like the moment you pay, you have access to all different sessions. And for the record, you can view. So the serial is the first time we’re doing it. So lab season one kicks off. So we don’t have recordings of live sessions because. That hasn’t been in it yet, but for the subscription course, there has been now a total of I think about 50 live sessions that we’ve done. You have recordings to all of them, the previous cohorts too. We don’t gate those from anyone. Um, so you can watch all of them. I don’t know if that’s the best use of your time to be frank, um, because Like they’re all individual teams and their group coaching calls, but Hey, if you want to look at them, they’re all there. Um, so they’re there and the, so are the kickoff sessions. Um, there’s a kickoff and a, and a send off sessions for each one. We have rewards. Um, you’ll, you’ll see it all in there. Right. Um, so you have access to everything on day one. The thing that we don’t get, give you access to on day one is two things. One is there is. Audio files that you can sideload onto your device for the course. And if you’re traveling, et cetera, and we have a 30 days, no questions asked refund period for all of our programs. So we want to make sure that that refund period has passed until we’re letting people download the course themselves. Um, the second thing. is once the courses end, um, for the subscription course, we have something called the accelerator alumni. And I think for the lab course, we’re going to call it lab alumni, but we might brand it to be a little bit more labby. Um, I don’t know. We’ll figure it out. But when you end your course, right, there still is live sessions every 90 days. In addition to the office hours that bring everyone back, who’s taken that course together. For additional insights, accountability, and see how people are doing because serials are an ongoing process, right? You don’t just write one serial and end, you’re going to keep writing that serial, just like subscriptions. You start your subscription, but it doesn’t end. You’re going to keep servicing and growing that subscription. So the whole program is designed to be a little bit more like. Evergreen in that sense and totally choose your own adventure. And to be honest, like I, I think there really is probably no other program that integrates the things like we do definitely nothing for subscriptions and materials, but even overall, like we do a really good job at letting people access things the way that works best for them. There’s been people who’ve taken the courses, not done the live sessions and still said it’s like gotten so much value for them and just watch recordings. We let you send in emails to your team lead, asking them questions that if you can’t make it live, you can still participate and still get that personal feedback. So, from not only them, but your team too. So it’s, yeah, we really do everything we can to meet authors where they are. Um, that’s what I would say to that. And in terms of like when these sessions are taking live, April and May for both the serials. And for the accelerator, the difference is that there’ll be an alternating week. So that if you’re taking both, they’re never on the same peak lab postdocs be funny. Um, yeah. So Jamie, we will, we will go over this. Um, and it’s gone over in the course as well. We talk a little bit about it. Um, but yeah, I mean, in short, like digital special editions are things you can think about for that. Um, what we kind of recommend is like how you could kick off. Um, a great serial when you already have published a story is using that fandom or those fans that you’ve already got it from your published stories if you have them and trying to launch that serial strong with them engaging with that content. So what you could then do is basically make it to that. You incentivize your fans who’ve already read the book to reread it again, which to do that, you might just need to include one or two extra scenes in there that get them excited. And now you’ve already got this base of people going in, talking about it, reading it, and that’ll give you a boost in any of the platforms. So obviously we go into detail about all these things, but Hey, I came here not this hour to hopefully help you all too and give you a lot of stuff to walk away from. So, um, hopefully that helps answer your question. And then of course, yeah, it’s covered in the course. Hopefully in the course, the idea is that you’re doing it and we’re giving you feedback on how you’re doing it. That’s the idea. Um, that’s why we do all of this. I’m glad I saw the ah, ah, ah, that is good. I think that connected for you. So I’m glad that helps. Um, so while I’m here, are there any other questions, anything I can help with? Jenny, great question. So, I think the serials course especially is good for a new author who wants to do serials. We basically kind of approach it like every author is new to serials, how you can grow an audience from zero in serials. That’s the goal. That’s what we do with the course. So, that’s a great one. For subscriptions, we have kind of a saying that subscriptions are about superfans. We help authors who are just getting started. But subscriptions, I would recommend for someone who’s probably been there for a bit longer, who knows a little bit about, you know, the industry. Maybe they haven’t published a book yet, but, like, it’s probably not designed to be your first course you’ve ever taken, or your first foray into publishing, because, like I said, subscriptions are a part of the ecosystem, and there’s other important parts of the ecosystem, and I think it’s important for you to know that subscriptions are right for you before you take the subscription course. So if you’re a new author, I’d recommend reading our book. We have a free book all about descriptions again on all the retailers. And if you read that book and you want more, like, of course it’s going to give you more, it’s going to dive into it super deeply. Um, but if you want to like know if it’s best for you and it’s best for you at this time, that’s what I’d recommend. The serials course really is designed for new people, but the descriptions is, we’ve tended to attract a little bit more of an advanced crowd of authors. And, you know, we’re aware of that, um, and I think that’s exactly why we wanted to start something that could be catered a little bit more to authors getting started with the Serials course. And the trick is that we’re not pretending to know how to help every beginning author get started, right? I don’t think anyone does. Instead, we’re trying to help authors succeed in the model that Amelia’s run, and that Amelia took from the beginning, and now has succeeded to where she is. And that’s exactly why we focused on Serials with that course, and exactly why I feel comfortable saying it. Yeah, as a beginner, if that pathway is interesting to you, something you want to go down, then that’s a great, great thing for you. For subscriptions, um, I think it just takes a little bit more commitment to knowing that that is right for you right now, right? Because maybe subscriptions are right for you in six more months. Um, and that’s okay. Um, you know, I want you to join this when it makes sense for you and when it’s best for you. Um, if you’re ready, it’s the place to be. That’s for sure. Oh, I missed this question. That was good. So yeah, um, I don’t know if you’ve actually checked the Ream site since like January, but we’ve implemented Discovery in the platform. So Ream itself functions actually a lot like, um, like, I want to use the word like retailer, because I kind of hate most of them because they take advantage of authors. But, um, there’s a component of Discovery on Ream that would make it feel familiar to a lot of authors and readers who also publish on other platforms. That’s a good way to word it. Um, so, yeah, if you just go to rapestories. com and see what I’m talking about, you can search for stories. Once you go to a stories page, you can even click on the author who published the story. Um, and it makes it, uh, uh, I think a good bit easier to find authors and find stories in different genres and sub genres of rape. Um, and it’s a beginning. We’re going to keep improving that process. There’s also, um, In terms of like, finding other authors who are looking to grow on Ream, um, we run a subscription swaps thing. That was a very unofficial way of saying it. But, um, you can go find subscription swaps, they’re live and active, and go sign up for them. Um, so that’s another thing we do, is that if you want to promote your subscription with other authors, um, you can enter a swap. So that page is there. And thank you, Erica, for, um, resurfing that question. Uh, any more questions, folks? Anything I can help with? Alexa has. Oh, do you know which parts are craft? I’m okay craft wise, might skip those if I sign up. Um, Module 3, Module 2, and Module 4 are the big craft ones. Um, so the beginning of the course is more focused on craft. And the end of the course is more focused on, now that you’re writing an awesome serial, how do we get it out there? How do we then monetize that eventually as well? Um, so yeah, Modules 2 through 4 will be where you should focus. In terms of the live sessions, week three would be the big one for you because we’re giving everyone a story, um, critique slash feedback. And that’s not like group feedback. Like we’re having one of the team leads sit down and read your serial and give you feedback, um, which will hopefully be helpful. Um, right now the plan is for Ariel to do most of them, but there’s a lot of people who’ve signed up, so we have a few backup people, um, who, who will also be doing it. But regardless, you’re going to have someone great who’s going to be reading your serials and giving you, like, advice and real, specific feedback. So kind of like a workshop in that sense, to be honest, um, which goes back to our ethos of trying to, you know, give as much as we can to help authors. Um, Awesome. Y’all, this was a lot of fun. Um, we’re super excited to have the Cereals program live. Um, and you guys, you guys rock. Um, no, you’re good, Chris. Let me see. Did you say there was a course for Cereals? I’m also just beginning and would like to eventually take Cereals as part of the course. Can I take Cereals as part of the course? Yes! So, Chris, what you could do Um, is if you take this year lab now, um, uh, I’ll, I’ll link to, um, the, this year lab. Uh, you can take the accelerator later. And basically what it is is right now, if you take the full bundle up front, it’s 800, it’s 500 feet separately, but we’ll give you a hundred dollar discount. Um, if you ever decide to do the other course later, so the bundle still gives you like the best discount up front, but if you choose, you want the other one later. It’s a hundred dollars off. Um, that’s what we’re gonna be implementing. Um, obviously for like this cohort, if you decided like within a week that you want the other course, we’d let you in on the bundle price. But, um, if you decide for like a later cohort after these courses close that you want back in, that’s what we would do. Um, so hopefully that helps. Um, we will try, you know, make it easier on you if you do wanna, I guess later take one of the courses. Um, and this is that link right here. Uh, do, do, do. Okay, um, yeah, no, of course, we’re happy to help. I’m, I’m happy that we can help you, Debbie. You’re, you’re awesome, and we are super, super excited to kick this, this next cohort off. Um, like we said, the live sessions start in April, but the moment you sign up, you get, you get access. So, um, I hope to see you all soon and I’ll certainly see you around the community. We have the Spring Into Serials event going on now, which if you don’t know, is a two week event to start, um, your serial or work on your existing novel. Um, we have a Discord that Erica in Arrow Running, Erica’s amazing, um, it’s called Spring Into Serials, um, and Yeah, this is the website for it. We are having like a new segment of the mailing list for serials, which in the coming months we hope to publish some more education there around serials as well and kind of build like a serial specific community, um, because Serials are a great pathway into subscriptions. I want to help encourage more authors and help authors be able to Maximize their serials. So yeah, that’s that’s another thing we’re doing. Yes, Karen The the bundle is the only thing limited in terms of the number of people. Everything else is just time limited. We give ourselves two weeks before we start the live sessions because that gives us time to plan the number of people that gives us time to bring on coaches. We have a number of people on standby, and that gives us time to pair coaches with people who are, you know, best for them, right? Because one coach might be a horror author. One coach might be an MPEG author. One coach might be dark romance, et cetera, right? So we, We, we give ourselves that two week leeway. Um, we just limited the bundle because the bundle itself is, um, something that we’re experimenting with and something that, um, we’re really excited to offer, but we don’t know how much or how often or like if that’ll be available again. We just have to see if there’s something that people want. So the bundle is the thing that’s limited. The other things are just limited based on time. As long as you get in, um, before midnight at March 15th, life is good. Um, and. Of course, between now and then plenty of time to email us with any questions. Specifically, if you have questions about the course, um, like, we have a separate team who runs the course. So, like, the Ream team itself doesn’t know much about the courses. I’m the one who probably knows all the things going on. Um, but. It’s sometimes hard to reach me with the amount of questions we get. So if you want to reach someone who’s going to respond to you specifically about courses and everything about courses, reach out to accelerator at descriptions for authors. com. That’s where Ariel is. Ariel runs, um, the courses and manages them. She’s fantastic. Um, and that’s, I think the best place to go for like any specific sort of questions. Of course, like especially during these launch periods, if anything comes in. I’m trying my best to answer, trying to forward it along. So don’t be too worried, no matter where you reach out to us, it will find its way to the right person. But if you want like the best fast response about accelerator, just go to accelerate descriptions for others. com. That’s where you’ll receive all communication to when you sign up. Um, so all right, everyone, I know it’s a lot to digest. Um, it’s a lot we’re giving you, but it’s, you know, hopefully something that answers your questions. And if you’re ready to make that big commitment, we’re making a big commitment to help you get there too. So, um, Excited to see so many people interested excited to see y’all here. I’m gonna end it now. Um, but I hope you all have an amazing rest of your weekend and Just again, thank you for this. We will be in touch We’ll see you at spring in the cereals all the other fun things going on and in the meantime as always don’t forget Storytellers rule the world. See y’all soon