By Michael Evans August 12, 2023
You all are here because you want to learn about subscriptions, grow your monthly income as authors, and build a thriving base of superfans.
Today, I’m going to share with you why the fundamentals behind what makes a successful subscription are more important than ever in a time of tremendous change in this industry.
In short, it’s why even if you are reading this and don’t yet have a subscription, we all have a lot to learn from thinking like a subscription author.
But first, I have a question for you.
How will you survive the storm?
Storms seem scary, but they abound with opportunity. Storms bring new life, they seed the sows of disruption, and they allow new ideas and business to form.
The last massive disruption to take place in publishing happened around 15 years ago.
The rise of the Kindle and the self-publishing ecosystem has enabled thousands if not 10,000+ authors to make a living writing fiction annually.
These are voices and stories largely left untouched by traditional publishers and who would likely not be making a living today as authors if it wasn’t for this change.
Well, another big change is coming and it’s happening today.
It is called the Creator Economy (which I wrote a book about here).
The Creator Economy consists of 5 converging megatrends that when put together will forever change publishing.
They are:
- Digital Ownership
- Micro-Content and Micro-Payments
- The Rise of Reading Creators
- The Gamification of Reading and Writing
- Generative Artificial Intelligence
Do I know exactly how these converging trends will shape the future of publishing?
No. I am not an oracle. No one is. And anyone claiming to “know where the future is headed” is either delusional, a huckster, or both.
And in this article, I am NOT diving deep into my predictions or definitions for these trends specifically. If curious about that, let me know, and I’m happy to make that a deeper blog in the future. I’ve also written an entire series about community and the future of publishing that was very popular with you all. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here.
Instead, I want to share with you how to survive and thrive in the storm changing the publishing landscape forever.
It comes down to understanding the three fundamental forces that separate a middling publishing business from the best selling authors.
Let’s dive into the first. I’m calling them your Publishing Moats.
Storytellers Rule the World and every author King and Queen needs their castle. But rivaling fiefdoms are threatening to stampede and barrage your castle walls. How will you save yourself from the chaos?
You need a moat. Filled with crocodiles, man-eating snakes, and poisonous water (figuratively, of course).
Moat #1: Your Brand
First, let’s define brand.
Brand is a consistent promise delivered over time.
Brand is NOT your banner image on your subscription, your covers, your font type, or the custom theme on your website.
All of these are elements that reinforce your brand. And contrary to what many authors believe, you do not need a graphic designer to build a great brand.
To create a great author brand you need:
- A clear(ish) idea of who your readers are and why they read stories in your genre/type. This is your target audience.
- A clear(ish) idea of your story spike. What makes your stories unique and different from others in your subgenre? This is your brand positioning.
- A clear(ish) idea of what you are offering exactly to your fans and what you are asking in return from them. This is your brand promise.
Put together your answers to these three questions neatly form your author brand. Notice how I used the descriptor “ish” (I know so official right?). This is to signify that your brand will evolve and change over time. EVERY brand does. But it’s good to regularly reflect and revisit this, potentially once a year. And for authors just getting started building their brand, I recommend building a minimum viable brand.
A minimum viable brand is the shortest, most simplified answer to these questions that you can think of. It’s not about building the “perfect” brand on day one. It’s about constructing a brand identity that allows you to test your theory in the publishing marketplace.
Think women in their 40s and 50s are your audience for second-chance romance?
What if you are wrong? What if it’s all women in their 60s and up attracted to your specific story spike and brand promise? What if your target audience isn’t resonating with your brand promise? What if you aren’t resonating with your own positioning or promise and want to change it?
These are the questions that can keep us up at night.
And this is why I implore you to get out of your head and into your stories.
You won’t know what works until you try it, feel it, and live it. A minimum viable brand is all about experimentation. Fewer exercises, fewer brand books, less overthinking and strategy meetings. More laser focus on the content that forms the foundation of our brand with a relentless pursuit of making our stories better.
Still with me?
Now I’m going to share why brand is so important.
In the publishing industry, brand is one of the 3 core moats. Yep, as we will learn, succeeding in an ever-changing industry, still relies on writing amazing stories. It’s just about leveraging that in a way that builds as strong a moat as possible (we have to keep out the invaders in times of chaos and change).
Brand taps into the scarcest resource in the world: Trust.
Trust is even more scarce than attention.
According to Dunbar’s Number, humans have the capacity to only have 150 relationships (this counts family, friends, and people in their entire social network) at any one time.
Our brains have a literal capacity for how many people they can trust. This is no different with brands.
This is a core reason why readers who consume hundreds of books per year often-times don’t remember the individual authors they read (it’s impossible to a certain point to be a fan of hundreds of authors… the mind can’t handle it).
This means that readers supplant trust in your brand with the brands of mega-corporations, all-in-one subscription platforms (Kindle Unlimited), and potentially specific reading creators (this is one of the publishing megatrends mentioned above).
Nothing is inherently wrong with this, but when trust in one brand supplants trust in your own brand, that makes you more replaceable as an author.
Building your own author platform is about building your brand. Uniquely connecting with a specific audience of readers with a specific kind of story that is unique to you (maybe not personally, but to your unique creative ability).
This differentiator turns your author name on the book cover into one of the most powerful forces in publishing.
And it’s why books from trad stalwarts like John Grisham can shoot to the top of the charts in pre-order with no cover and no description.
Just his name pulls enough weight to move markets.
Your subscription is about building enough trust in your brand to get readers to keep coming back month after month and paying you directly. That is immensely powerful. And a huge way to survive and thrive in a changing industry.
But brand is only one component of your moat.
And this next one is just as crucial.
Moat #2: Your Data
Data is any quantitative or qualitative input that can be used to better inform your business and creative processes.
Data is nearly everything. It’s the 21st-century oil.
In the coming age of publishing, we will see one massive change with data. The importance of a curated high-quality dataset just got exponentially more valuable.
I won’t nerd out here completely about generative technologies impacts from an economic standpoint on the value chain of the technology and publishing industry, but with the creation side of content going down in raw cost (you can read my article about that here) we will see the importance of high-quality data rise.
Before the age of big data, data was scarce. Not much of it could be stored and most tracking and input of data was time-consuming. With the rise of big data, we can track and store almost everything at near-zero cost.
In a world of limitless data, what data matters to us as authors?
There are 3 key categories:
Reader Relationship Data: think about your readers’ emails, their payment history (which products/books/subscriptions have they bought), and potentially other key data like physical address if shipping them books.
The core value in this: direct outreach to your customers at any time for upsells (think upgrading from a $5 tier to a $10 tier) + cross-sells (think going from your subscription to buying books a-la-carte or buying merch) that can increase the Lifetime Value of your reader. Retargeting marketing to readers who don’t convert to specific launches/product lines and move them further along in the reader journey.
How well are subscription platforms at giving you this? (9/10 only cause 10/10 would imply it’s perfect and there’s always room for improvement).
Pretty darn well. Every subscription platform to my knowledge gives you direct access to your readers’ emails and payment history (and if the platform you are using doesn’t, run from them because you have so many other and better options). Setting up your payment relationship with the platform is a more complicated discussion that ranges between Managed (handles sales tax + VAT for you) and Direct (you are the merchant of record and have extra ownership of reader payment data… this is a great benefit).
I won’t go into details here cause this one essay will be the size of a book. But you can learn more about that here (most subscription platforms and payment processing tools only give you one option of how to do business with them, so know what you are getting yourself into. Ream is the only platform that gives authors a Managed and Direct option).
Retailers and platforms not based around direct selling give you ZERO of this data. They get a whopping 0/10.
Reader Experience Data: think of quantitative measures like who has read your book(s), the time they have spent reading, etc. And qualitative measures like reviews, and feedback in your stories comment section.
The core value in this: data on what readers are enjoying and which parts of your stories they slow down in helps you to create more page-turning stories. Furthermore, having this data individualized or at the very least segmented by different tags you assign to your readers can dramatically increase your retention and lifetime value.
How well are subscription platforms at giving you this? Pretty poor in my opinion. The average is 3 to 5/10 pending on the platform you use and how you weigh the personal importance of the quantitative side versus the qualitative side.
Qualitatively subscription platforms do an excellent job. They bundle the features of a social media platform, publishing platform, and community platform into one. You can make community posts on any platform you use that allows you to receive comments.
Quantitatively, virtually every platform is pretty poor at this in my opinion. Some platforms give you more data than others at the moment, but none give a high-quality stream of data that is focused on specific quantitative metrics that matter to authors.
Things I’d like to see on subscription platforms are:
- Knowing when readers stop reading down to the paragraph level.
- Being able to build re-engagement messages and notifications that get readers back into your stories.
- Being able to view this reader retention data where you can see retention graphs for each book. E.g. Spikes where readers drop off, ability to see how many pick-ups a book has (i.e. how many times does someone open their device before completing the book). The ability to segment these reader retention graphs by tier (do readers in higher tiers like certain stories of yours more)?
- An author reader management system that can analyze this data (both qualitative and quantitative) for you at a high level for you and let you know your top fans, fans who are “falling off” aka less engaged than they used to be, and your hot fans (fans who are new but deeply engaged compared to fans in the rest of their cohort).
All of this is possible. And we are going to build this (just be patient, things take time, but we have a VISION).
And to be honest, the 4 points I mentioned above are just the beginning.
Right now, the retailers have all of this data. They get a 1/10 if I’m being generous cause they at least let you see at a high level your number of total reads and sales. This is pitiful compared to what’s possible.
What would happen if you had it? What would happen if a tool could deliver all of these insights to you, analyze them, and give you actionable insights on how you can deepen relationships with your fans and create better stories?
This data in the hands of AUTHORS will change publishing forever.
And it’s why building your own platform as an author just got 10x more important.
This kind of data set is immensely valuable. It’s a dataset that Amazon has used to empower a discovery and advertising ecosystem that makes them hundreds of millions in profit from their book business per year.
And unleashing it in the hands of storytellers will help you all make billions more.
Which, there’s one more important ingredient to this data pie…
Attribution Data: think of knowing where your readers discovered you from or entered your subscription platform from.
How well are subscription platforms at giving you this? I would say anywhere from a 6 – 7 out of 10. I’d grade the retailers at a 3 to 4/10.
If you use tracking links that you use on other platforms, advertising, and marketing channels, you can get a pretty good idea of where clicks are coming to your subscription platform from (this is true for retailers as well).
Where subscription platforms stand out is that you also have individual details on sales or followers that are driven on the platform. You can fairly accurately attribute each channel not only to traffic but also to conversions. AND you can attribute it to individual readers that you can then use as further data to discover and find more readers like that.
At this time, subscription platforms do not have as robust attribution tools as building a full e-commerce suite on your own website. The only downside to attribution on e-commerce sites/selling through your own site is that often times these tools are yet another plug in to learn, set-up, and pay for.
I personally hope that subscription platforms can continue to improve their out-of-the-box attribution so that authors can have a “single source of truth” in their subscription dashboards and simplify data flows from a time, money, and efficiency aspect.
However, there is one caveat here with Attribution Data that I need to mention.
It is impossible to get perfect Attribution Data.
It’s impossible to get perfect any kind of data… but with Attribution this is especially true. How do you know what your first and last touch points with a reader were before they took an action?
It’s very difficult to directly attribute word-of-mouth sales or recommendations or subscription sales that come from in-person events.
And even if we could track everything in the digital world…
Was it your post on Instagram that threw them over the edge? Your newsletter? Your advertisement on Facebook?
In short, Attribution is important, we should always try to attribute as much of our subscription growth to some sort of channel but know that it’s better to get some useful data that can help you act and make better marketing decisions rather than no data at all (don’t let perfect be the enemy of good!).
And yes, one last data category…
Bonus Category: Demographic and Interest Data: I won’t go into detail here, because there are a lot of privacy concerns related to capturing this data and I think this sort of reader data has lots of potential value to provide to authors but is less practical than the three categories listed above. This data should ALWAYS be aggregated as well.
For this think, what countries do my readers live in? What are other stories similar to mine that they consume? What age are my readers?
You can go way deeper than this, but I think these would be the core questions I’d be interested in.
This kind of data subscription platforms get a mediocre 4/10 on. They can give you the country of your reader with things like addresses. However, other demographic and reader interest data is limited on both subscription platforms and direct-selling platforms.
I think this will change in the future (foreshadowing for far future exciting developments that can happen on an author-powered subscription platform that can tap into a broader pool of reading behavior data and use it to empower ALL of its storytellers… but I digress).
As we can see after examining some of the categories of data, there is a world of unlimited potential and insights out there for authors.
The key is being able to build YOUR PLATFORM that allows you to own your relationship with your readers.
This is the core of having a subscription as an author. And over time, as analytics and tracking tools improve (and they will… mark my words) the power that you will garner from that relationship will increase mightily.
But data isn’t everything.
Optimizing with data alone is NOT what art and being a creative is about. Taking data into account in your larger decision-making process and having it as one part of your moat is essential. But there’s an even more important weapon you can deploy to grow and defend your publishing business in chaotic times.
Moat #3: Your Network
Your network is the ecosystem of relationships your readers have with one another and the overlapping relationships these readers have with other similar networks (think of other authors in your genre, literary events, etc.).
The data we measured above offer some indicators that allow you to examine the health and scale of your network (i.e. retention of subscribers, engagement on posts, subscriber growth).
But a network consists of real relationships between real people and is something that can never wholly or even get close to the root of summing up.
Facebook Groups, TikTok, and your newsletters are all tools we can use to foster community and nurture your network of readers… but they do not encompass your network.
If interested in reading more about this, I wrote an essay all about this called Why Community is the Greatest Asset for Authors.
If network is so important, how do we know if our reader network is powerful?
Network math is actually an entire field of academia and industrial research that is fascinating and folks all the time try to drive fancy mathematical equations to determine the power of a network.
I have a simple equation:
Reader Network Strength = # of ReadersLevel of Fan (Scored from 0 to 5)
Or in other words, the # of Readers you have to the power of the average Fan Level is the strength of your network.
Talking about Fan Levels (from 0 to 5) will be an essay for another day, and a really fun one in creating your own Superfan Flywheel.
But the big takeaway from this equation is this…. If you have a million readers who have zero trust in you and are at a zero Fan Level… the strength of your network is just one.
Meanwhile, if you have 100 readers who on average have a 3 Fan Level (this is very high as an average, think that this is a group of 100 relatively dedicated fans), then you will have a stronger network than someone who has 10,000 readers with a 1 Fan Level (this is a cold audience who maybe saw an ad and clicked on a landing page… they haven’t read your work yet but have some familiarity). This is because 100 to the 3rd power is 1 million while 10,000 to the 1st power is just 10,000.
This equation has a lot of nuance… so try not to get bogged down in it, because this is a preview of a future essay.
The takeaway this time is that the strength of your reader network is determined by the # of readers you have connected to and the strength of your relationship to them (with the strength of your relationship yielding exponential returns in the total strength of your network).
Now, let’s get out of numbers land, and into the sociological phenomena that make a network strong.
After all, if network math is all just theory, what about network strength can we FEEL in practice?
It has to do with 3 core network effects that expand and strengthen as your reader network gets healthier.
Network Effect #1: Bandwagon
This is the most common network effect we see in books that go viral on BookTok or other online reading communities.
It’s the hot book of the month and everyone is reading it… so I can’t miss out!
This is a very powerful network effect.
Network Effect #2: Language Network Effects
This is when people start to use your books, characters, or other elements of your brand in everyday conversation. To show the power of network effects at scale, I know that my audience here is a group of authors who has familiarity with popular genre fiction books.
An example of these language network effects would be referring to the Harry Potter Series when chatting about best-selling books.
Now think about all the different contexts of conversation. Can you make your book the default option?
For many authors, they have benefited from language network effects, their stories getting passed down through generations as people ask for science fiction book recommendations, or chat about thriller books, and similar authors continue coming up and up again, reinforcing their network strength.
How can you break in? Carve out a niche or have a specific story spike that makes your story the reference point when people have a specific kind of conversation. This is hugely powerful… and very hard to break once you get it working for you.
Network Effect #3: Tribal
This network effect is about people finding a sense of belonging and identity in your work. This is the one most closely tied with your community and fandom and is one of the few network effects that authors can start to tap into and FEEL the effects of before they have a larger reader base.
When people feel a part of something, it is very difficult for them to leave. Leaving the network (aka not being a fan of yours anymore) would be like ripping out a part of who they are. That is painful, challenging, and explains why so many superfans who become a part of your tribe never leave.
This network effect also reinforces itself with readers who feel a part of your tribe inviting people in their life to become part of your tribe. Think passing your books on to friends and grandchildren.
What you will notice about all 3 of these network effects is that they get stronger the larger your network is (which is precisely by design of how a network effect works) and are key ways that word-of-mouth discovery takes place.
Now here is where a subscription platform is crucial in helping you to build your own network effects… your subscription is all about your tribe.
As we discovered, Language Network Effects and Bandwagon are hard to get going as an author just getting started. And even for an author well-established in their career, creating a Bandwagon effect tends to be more of a one-off phenomena rather than something that can be manufactured in perpetuity.
But Tribal Network Effects are different.
They are open and accessible to every author. And you actually have an advantage as a smaller author getting these network effects kickstarted.
Remember Dunbar’s Number? Humans can’t have relationships with more than 150 people at once. When fans join your subscription, you have an opportunity to deliver on your promises, take their feedback and other data points into account in crafting a better experience for them, and build a direct relationship with them that can make them feel a part of your journey (or that of your character’s).
In the end, building a subscription platform and building your own platform as an author gives you unbelievable leverage to start digging your moats that can protect your publishing business long into the future.
All of these moats reinforce each other.
Stronger brand leads to better data which leads to a stronger brand and more readers which can reinforce your network effects and enable you to treat your tribe better which strengthens your brand…
You get the idea.
There’s an endless interplay between these forces in a beautiful positive-sum matter.
And for our valiant subscription author heroes, there is a land of opportunity in an uncertain future that allows you to further your author career and make more money from your stories than ever before.
There’s never been a better time to build your own author platform.
And I hope that for all of you embarking on this journey, you now have a few more weapons in your storyteller toolbox as you conquer far-off lands and worlds and change the lives of your readers for the better.
Don’t forget Storytellers Rule the World.
Your platform is your world. Create it. Have fun with it. And use your power wisely.
The future is counting on you.