Posted on January 27, 2024.
RJ is a best-selling Urban Fantasy author with 3 subscriptions that generate over $100k per year in revenue. In this episode, we learn why she has multiple subscriptions, how she grows and manages them, and how you can build a six-figure subscription.
Join the waitlist for the next Six-Figure Subscription Author Accelerator: https://academy.storytellersruletheworld.com/subscriptions-for-authors-accelerator
RJ Blain’s Links:
Website: https://www.thesneakykittycritic.com/
Subscription: https://reamstories.com/rjblain/public and https://www.patreon.com/RJ_Blain
#57 Episode Transcript:
Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Descriptions for Authors podcast. Today we have RJ Blaine with us, who is actually the most successful urban fantasy author in subscriptions in the world. That’s right, RJ Blaine is crushing it. She’s got three subscriptions, all serving different segments of her audience, and put together, they make nearly six figures a year, which is just incredible.
So, this episode you’re gonna learn a lot about how to succeed with subscriptions, If you want to start a subscription yourself, uh, you should do it on Ream. Ream is a subscription platform by fiction authors for fiction authors. And if you’re looking to set up to be able to connect with your audience, build a community of your readers, then there’s no better place than Ream.
In fact, you can even reach new readers through Discovery on the Ream platform. So you can create a free account down below, and I’m very, very excited for it. So, hopefully you’ll enjoy this episode. Let us know what you learned. We’d love to see you post in the Facebook group if you learned something from R.
J. Blaine, if you learned something from this episode, we want to hear from you. And if you haven’t yet been acquainted with all the Scriptions for Others content, we’d also love to see you join us on our mailing list where you get a free book and you get to access to tons of amazing resources like our fireside chats, like our Subscriptions for Others pricing calculator, industry report, all this amazing stuff.
But for now, we’re going to get into this conversation between me, Emilia, and of course, our special guest, R. J. Blaine.
rj, I am very excited to chat with you because you have a subscription set up that most authors listening when I say this will feel their heart race. They’ll, it’ll jump cuz they’ll be like, how are you doing that? You have three separate Patreons, all of which, yep.
Are quite successful. They all do very well. Walk me through when you started the first one and at which point you were in, in your author career, what was that point where you’re like, oh, I’m gonna step a subscription now?
Oh, this actually starts a few years ago when Patreon was brand new. I tried and failed at a Patreon.
I just didn’t have the attention span for it, and I didn’t have the audience for it. I’m just gonna establish right now, if you’re a new author and you start a Patreon, don’t expect very much. It grows as you grow. And that is the most important thing you need to remember before you like look at me and go, Ooh, copy.
Like by all means copy. I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all. The way I do it is I have so many different audiences and everybody has different needs. So my three Patreons reflect the different needs of my segments of audience. Some people want the whole shebang and that’s what I started with. The core of what I do is I write books I wanted to give people who kept asking me, can I do anything for you off of Amazon or off of Barnes and Nobles or Cobo or Apple Books or Google Play.
We don’t talk about Google Play. We’re having a fight right now. But the big thing is my audience kept asking me, do you have a donation box? Do you have anything we can do to support you as a writer? And I’m like, oh, there’s Patreon. I suppose I could do that. So I fished around on Facebook and asked if there was any interest and five or 10 people said, yeah, there’s interest.
And I went, you know what? It’s easy and if it makes five or 10 people happy, why not? So I dove in set up the first one, which is the, you get everything. It’s got monthly tiers, you pay by month. And I was like, okay, I can do read alongs, like backless read alongs. I can do short stories and basically behind the scenes stuff on the book.
So you don’t get from the retail copies or you don’t even get from me on Facebook. You sometimes get it on my website, but unique content to that I can do in my spare time. So I was like, okay. I flung that at them. And then the next thing I knew I had 150 subscribers and I went, what? So it took me completely off guard so it evolved.
The first re reiteration of it, I didn’t do all that great of a job setting it up because I didn’t know what I needed. It’s okay to experiment and it’s okay to change things. So if you don’t get it right the first time, just tell your readers, okay, I’m changing this for this reason. And then make the change.
As long as you’re communicating with them what you need to do and why you need to do it, they’re usually really happy. If they’re not, they’ll just drop and that’s okay because if they’re that upset over something as little as I need to change frequency of posting, you don’t want them on your Patreon in the first place.
Yeah. You want people who are friendly, nice. You want people who aren’t gonna get upset if plans change. So I try to set mine up in such a way where it was as hands off as possible while I’m able to engage as much as possible. There’s a trick to that. I
love that word, hands off as possible, but engage as much as possible.
I love that way of framing it. It’s,
I love engaging with my readers, but it can be a huge time sink. You need to plan, okay, I have an hour. I can sacrifice a week to just engagement. If your hour towards engagement involves an hour and a half of admin work to make it happen, you’re losing time, you’re losing money, you’re not able to write books efficiently.
So what I’ve done is when I’m not really social, I will go into my Patreon and schedule my posts in advance. I do everything. I don’t have a pa do it. It’s every time I post something, my readers know it’s me doing the work. So they know that engagement is directly with me. They do know I sometimes schedule things because time is limited, but when they see a comment from me, when they see a post from me, they know it’s from me.
Readers have learned PAs exist and do this for authors. Fastest way you drop an audience is to have the PA do the engagement. They don’t like it. They don’t appreciate it. They want to be talking with you. The only time I’ve seen this actually work is Patricia Briggs, her assistant openly posts, it’s your man.
Anne’s doing the posting. If Patricia shows up, you know it’s her cuz she doesn’t sign it as Anne. So the reader’s expectations are clearly laid out. If she shows up, she doesn’t, I don’t think I’ve seen her show up more than like once in the past couple of years. But she will write the post and then Ann will post it on her behalf.
. They’re paying to have access to you, so you have to make sure that you’re accessible. That does mean scheduling an hour or two a week to go through and make sure your posts are up. Make sure you’re commenting when somebody has a question or sends you a message, you do need to take the time to answer them.
I have noticed if you go, if you message me, I’m a squirrel, I may not see it. They’re okay with that. As long as you’re up front and you tell them you’re a squirrel and you forget the messages. Yeah, I’m a squirrel. Yeah, I’m a squirrel. So what ended up happening with splitting into three Patreons is that I have a segment of readers who wants to just fling money at me.
They’re your best readers. You wanna have these small core readers. I. They will follow you everywhere and they will support you even if they don’t wanna read that specific book. I don’t understand that personally, but hey it’s great and it supports me. Lets me write. Yeah. I do it too. Actually.
There’s a lot of books I own on my Kindle that I’m not going to read this, it’s too traumatic for me. But I buy the books anyway cuz I want those authors to keep writing. Yeah. So if I buy those books, I don’t want, they have the money to write the books I do want. So I put my money where my mouth is. Yeah.
In the case of the monthly Patriot, cause I call monthly per novel and per short story. You have the three different setups. I have the three different setups. The per monthly is, they get everything. If I do a short story, they get it. If I do a novel that’s not an anthology or collection or publishes somebody else, they get it.
I do have a few limitations on the per novel, but when a story comes up, this isn’t included. They know. I’m like, heads up, you have to go to retail for this. All of my short story collections, all of my anthologies are never on the Patreon. Sometimes they’re published through another publisher and I don’t have rights so that’s how that started. In the case of the patron, I also, the per month they get to test drive stuff. So I’m like, I’m not sure if this pilot’s going to work. Here’s a chapter. What do you think? The higher tiers get access to this is experimental.
Is it working, is it not working? Do you like it? And they’ll get read alongs of unpublished stuff that hasn’t been edited full of mistakes. They love that. All subscribers on the per monthly right now are following shattered flame, which I’m a photographer as well.
I’m not like a photographer. I’m like, it’s my hobby. I do it for fun with a camera that costs way too much. But I post a picture that I took and I make a little note about the picture, where it came from or why I like it. And then I have the author’s note above the chapter about what I was thinking or was I having a dinner date with the devil when I wrote it.
The latest one was definitely a dinner date with the devil as I wrote it. Sorry, readers, that’s just how that one works. So it’s very much I get that engagement with them. They get to see the back behind the scenes stuff and we go through memory lane. So the readers who have been with me a long time haven’t read the book in a few years.
And so we do read alongs. It’s supposed to be weekly, but with I have seasonal depression and it’s been raining here in California for months. So I’m just following my way out right now. And so my schedule’s been screwed up. And then I’m going to Sydney in the beginning of June for signing.
So Nice. I have to do stuff up beforehand, so that’ll be interesting. I’m gonna be like, what is time and how does it work? I’m still trying to figure out the scheduling, because time in California is not time in Australia. No. Oh I’m feeling that I just came back from Australia and our time is messed up still.
I’m gonna be there for three weeks. Oh my time’s really gonna be confused. Like I, I’ll get there, be there a week. Oh, now I’m in Australia time. Come back and we teleport back in time to get here. So we leave later in the day than we arrive. I’m not really sure how this time work works, but we’re, we arrive really early in the morning and we left closer towards the afternoon in Australia.
And I’m like, wow, that plane is quick. It goes zoom. So yeah. That’s gonna make my Patreon interesting. Cause at the same time I’m traveling, I’m preparing a book for publication. Mistakes are made. That’s all I have to say. I’m the one making them. And it’s been just the past two months have been just a mistake after mistake it.
Yeah.
There’s, you just delivered like so much subscription knowledge, wow. First of all, like you are incredible. Like you just have so much knowledge and. I think framing your subscription. So one thing that stuck out to me, cuz you’re being like just so honest and open with us and I could already tell your you are that way with your readers.
I was reading your short story about you section to this subscription and on that page I believe you have
I don’t even, oh,
I’m now gonna unearth something. Okay. Yes, this is fun. This will be fun. So it’s the fantasy, just so y’all know RJs Patons will all be linked in the description.
The three of them will be linked and the one that I’m looking at right now is called the Fantasy Worlds of RJ Blain. So you’re creating fiction source stories and you have I believe four tier levels. So you’ve got a dollar and a $2 one, and then a $5 and a $10 one. And first of all, I love how like the dollar and $2 tiers are exactly the same.
They just, if they wanna pay you more, they can, and then the $5, the $10 tiers you get a little bit more at $5. But they’re still the same.
Yep. It’s basically at the request of my readers I thought one dollar’s not enough. I’m like, really? I was just gonna make everything a dollar. And I was like, okay, here you go.
It’s all a dollar. Do what you want. And they yelled at me. I got yelled at the original intent for the short story Patreon was everything was a dollar. But then I opened my mouth and I said, I could have the kitties write a micro short story for you. Yes. You said I, I’ll throw money at you.
I’m like, the cats would love to. Tell you about how bad of a human I am. Sure. We’ll do this. Yeah. So you have,
so I love this. Yeah. Yeah. So you have your two short stories. You have your short story and you have your two tiers. The $1 and $2 that just get the short story. Then if you upgrade to $5 or $10, they both get this extra benefit.
You get the, like the micro flash fiction rid by your cats,
maybe 15 words. It’s like a hai coop. It is a haiku about how I suck, or I didn’t scoop their litter box sufficiently yesterday or something. It’s whatever mood my cat is in. So I have two cats. I have Dazzle and I have Princess Zazzle’s. 14 to 16 pounds of what the hell actually happened here?
She was supposed to be small. We picked this cat up when she was six months old. She was. Looks small. The looks weigh in at seven pounds. I’m like, okay, six months she’s gonna grow one or two more pounds and we’re gonna call it a day. Most cat breed, you get them at six to seven months and they’ve done the bulk of their growing wrong.
We think she’s got rag dollar main Coonan or somewhere because this is a big cat. She’s just massive. And she’s not fat massive. She’s, I have a primordial pouch, but I’m actually a pretty sleek cat. I just have bulky side cuz some cats just do. She’s a tiny bit overweight, but not to the, she’s just, she’s 30 something inches long.
Princess is, that’s a big cat. 15 inches long.
That’s one of the cats in your fantasy world. It’s like we’re getting into that
size. Yeah we’re getting into, we wanted a tiny cat zazzle ale. Cause we my husband’s Cat Tia passed away. Oh. And I dragged him to the shelter the next morning. Cuz Princess needed a friend and Aw, he needed to not dig his heels in We introduced ourselves to every single cat in that shelter.
Zazzle and five other kittens are in the sick cat room. They had rhino and we’re spreading it to themselves. So the shelter has, okay, these cats are sick, but you can go visit them. We sanitize it before you go in, et cetera. So my husband’s trying to decide how to adopt three tuxedos. Who just swarmed him.
So he’s can we take all three? I’m like, no, they’re really cute, but we can’t take all three. And then the super shy dazzle comes out and just frees herself over his seat, wraps herself around his leg and just snuggles up. I love you. And he is looking at the cat, looking at me, and I’m like, why don’t you just go get the cat carrier honey?
And so that’s the story of how Zazzle charmed her way into our house. Now she’s in aloof rules everything, and there we have it zazzle’s, the talker of the Patreon. So if you see a short story, it’s coming from Dazzle. So I look at what sizzle’s doing that day and what kind of mood Dazzle is in. And that is, is what those subscribers get.
Z’s trouble. She’s 16 pounds of trouble. So they get the cat talking smack. And the readers love it. I don’t pull them out very much right now cause I just, it’s really hard to write as the cats. And so they’re gonna get a surprise when the cats show up after Australia. Cause they’re going to they’re not gonna be happy.
We left them for so long. We’re hiring a house sitter to watch the cats for us, so at least they won’t be going into boarding this time. They will get to stay home and be pampered. So lucky them, they wanna be pampered. But yeah, the kitties rule the show. They don’t show up often, but when they do, the readers love it.
So I reserve the cats for when I’m in trouble. I’m late with something or it’s a very good get out of jail card. So yeah. Okay, here you go. I have some cats. Here you go. You like the kitties. Don’t get mad at me please. But yeah. So the short stories were actually. Separated out because the people who wanted the per novel Patreon didn’t wanna have to subscribe to the monthly to get the short stories.
So I’m like, okay, I’m just gonna fling it up here. Anything I get off the short story goes to camera gear or vacations or fun stuff. So everyone who goes there knows if I make money off of that Patreon, it’s getting wasted on fun stuff. I will buy craft supplies of camera stuff. I will buy ice cream whatever my little heart wants that money is for that.
I haven’t been writing many short stories at recent. It’s been a dry, well of short stories actually. Sad does that I have to be in a good mood for short stories or it just don’t happen. Novels. I can be in any mood in I can jump ahead a couple of chapters and tortures and characters if needed, but with a short story, I have to write them in order of when the story happens, how it happens, or I just go.
Brain explodes. I had to write short stories for 101 ways to die and I’m almost done. I’m on the last one and it’s only taken me a week to do five, so that’s actually not bad. Yeah. Hey, hooray. For me, I was worried about that cuz I haven’t written a short story in six months. I’m like, ok. All right.
Let’s see if I remember how to do this. No I don’t. And so then we have it
during that break too, because your short story Paton, that’s like per short story. So those readers just weren’t charged during that break, is that right? That’s correct,
yeah. So that’s the whole difference between the branching the per month is I have to always do content because they’re paying every month.
But the $10 plus tiers get a copy of the novels a couple of days before retail release, same schedule as the per novel Patreon. They get the read alongs, they. Get q and a sessions where I just okay, ask me stuff and I’ll either reply via comment or I will make a big q and a answer post depending on my mood at the time.
That’s awesome. I kinda prefer the comments nowadays cuz it’s, I can engage in micro bytes where in the biggest way I have to try to dig through, get all the comments out, format them. So I’m now just doing the more direct engagement approach. So questions get repeated, but that’s fine. I can just copy paste if I get the same exact question, I copy paste.
I ain’t even like I copy this from above. Here you go. Yeah. Or I will link to where the answer to the question is depending on how lengthy the reply is. Sometimes if a question is really oh, I wanna talk about this, I will post it on the blog and then I’ll come back to the Patreon and go, okay, here’s a post about it.
Okay. It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes a question will just be that good and it’ll go right to the blog. I’m starting to move. I haven’t had time to do any posts about the writing industry lately, but I tried to cross post those to Patreon and my blog, so everybody has it. I know there’s some authors who follow me for that reason.
I haven’t done hardly anything with that lately. Been too tired and too busy. I’ll put too much on the plate is what happened here. I I have a novel coming out next week. I have one coming out June 2nd. I have one coming out July 25th. And then I jumped to November. And there may be something in between that I’m not allowed to talk about yet.
So there’s something in there. Surprise.
It’s a busy next couple of months for you without a doubt, which makes you even more grateful to have you here with us today. And speaking of all the things you have on your plate, managing three subscriptions, you know that when we talk about subscriptions, a lot of authors are like, should I set one up for my pen names?
Which technically your novel subscription is an all-in-one for your different pen names, but you also have like kind of these three separate pats. Four, you’re one RJ
blame pen names, five pen names now, or something like that. I have five.
How are you? I’ll just ask both questions.
How are you managing all five pen names to begin with? And then when it comes to managing three subscriptions, a lot of authors are like, should I just combine all my different pen names onto one page? So you only have one page, obviously for you, you have different billing systems. So I, there’s so much to dive into here, but talk to me about the multiple pages.
This is good. Okay.
So where’s the best place to start? I’m gonna start with managing all the pen names.
So for some people, I’m Bernadette Franklin. And they’re reviewing RJ BLA books. Who talking about Burnette Franklin books? I’m like, that’s cute. That’s really cute actually. I have Susan Copperfield ah, I found her Susan Copperfield, or I found her as Bernard Dead Franklin, or I found her as well, RJ Blaine and I’m on my contemporary romantic comedy pen name.
So it, it’s a double-edged sword at times, but if you have readers who just wanna read your books and you hide your pen names from those readers, they’re not gonna buy the books cuz they’re not sure who this new pen name is, et cetera. You start from scratch. So unless you have a real good reason to hide it, I wouldn’t hide it.
I know there are some authors that hide it because they feel they’ve lost the chance with the reader the first time and they want a fresh chance. The reality is when a reader doesn’t like a book, They forget, they don’t like it. You get plenty of more chances later on. You don’t have to really worry about that.
They have an attention span of maybe a month. I can’t remember any of the authors. I didn’t like really, unless the book was just that bad and I wrote it down. And for a book to be that bad for me, it has to have no editing done on it whatsoever. Or the character is only strong because she was raped.
I hate that troop. I hate that troop. So I write down when an author does that a lot, and then I just don’t read them, not my taste. So yeah, that’s about, it’s don’t reinvent the wheel, please. Just it’s okay. Readers don’t have that big of an attention span. Here’s a fun statistic from Amazon in the KU program.
The reason I say publish every two to three weeks is because a reader has a three week attention span. They will forget about you within three weeks, and you have to start the advertising over again. If you don’t keep feeding them within that three week window in ku, they drop right away. Like it is literally a cliff.
So that’s why they’re rapid release in the KU because reader statistics say after three weeks they forget about you, but you will hold their attention for three weeks and in wide, like I published, it’s actually true. You can, I can see it. Every single release, three week window button. So how a release works is you have the release day sales up to here, and then it goes like this.
It’s a very constant downward arc, and the three week mark goes, just drops right off the cliff. There’s that little cliff there. Three or four weeks, the hype is gone. The readers have forgotten about the book. They have moved on. They’re not talking about it to their friends anymore. So every book release, and I’ve done like 60 of them now, it’s consistent.
Three weeks, boom, three weeks, boom. When you’re not rapid releasing, I don’t rapid release, I accidentally rapid released. I’m like, what have I done? I had a release on April 28th, May 16th, happy birthday to me. I’m stupid and release a book on my birthday every year. I’m just stupid and I do it. Don’t ask me why.
And then June 2nd, this is the definition of rapid release. But to be fair to me, I hadn’t released a book since December, and that was launching a new pen name. I think my previous release was October or something like that, and that was an anthology. So I have actually been just laying low in writing books.
Not releasing books. Now I’m in this eight month marathon of why
I’m curious with, because I think it’s really interesting to be talking about like the reader attention span, but when you’re doing things like weekly chapter read alongs in your subscription reset. Yeah. Yep. So how has that helped you retain and build a strong relationship with your core fans?
Like how has your subscription done that?
It doesn’t do anything. It, I’m sorry, but the subscription, I can go, I have gone, I have to drop for two months. I will be back sweetheart to whatever you want. Drop. I’ll have very basic stuff for you. But I am drowning. Didn’t lose a single subscriber.
They’re there cuz they want to be there. The rules don’t apply to your court readers. They are, they’re the people who they don’t care if you only give ’em a book once a year. They don’t care if you give ’em a book every six years. They’re gonna stick with you thick and thin. Those are your core readers.
Most authors don’t have a huge number of core readers, but I can name an author who does Alana Andrews. They’re a husband and wife team. Andrews has the book Devouring Hoard. She has a very solid core of group of core readers. They congregate on their website and they use their website as a way of engaging with their community.
And they’re brilliant at it. They’re absolutely brilliant. They feed their hoard daily, basically like they, and they have a moderator who is openly the moderator. Alonna. Lonial Alonna the wife of the parenting, I believe is the one who typically does the posts. Andrew is much quieter. You see him sometimes, but he’s usually only there when they’re doing a, like video together.
But they do it brilliantly. They just engage with their community and they have a huge number of core readers goals. That’s what they are. They’re goals. Yeah. In my case, I have a very small number of core readers, but I engage with them and they engage back. I would say my core readership has across all my Patreons with something like 400 people, 500 people.
It’s fu it’s funny you call that small. Most authors would dream to have a core readership of that size.
So I’m going to dig in some more statistics for you cuz I love statistics. Yeah. Most books don’t sell more than a hundred copies. There was recently a lawsuit involving the big name publishers and most of their titles that they have acquired, and like we’re talking the big five or four or however many of them are left four now they’re trying to become four.
They merge. One of them, two of them merge together. And now I’m like, yeah,
it’s hold on, penguin Rander house, they wanna become three now. That’s what this whole thing was about. Yeah.
Oh my gosh. And yeah, that lawsuit has some really good numbers and as numbers we’ve always suspected, but we never had access to.
But the most books only sell a hundred copies. Is ac dead accurate? 500 copies is, you are doing really good. It puts into perspective u s A today before it went defunct though, to make u s A today I have had books that have sold five hun, 5,500 copies. Missed the list. To give you an idea and you have to sell all those copies within a week.
I did it by Preor, but I’ve also done it in blitz sales too. It’s hard. It’s really hard and a lot of people rat on the groups to get together and do it. But it’s hard, like doing it by yourself is insane. It is insane. If you see an author who’s made u s A today, they are a brilliant to marketing.
Write real damn good books. You have to write those real damn good books though. If you want to make u s A today, especially if it’s not a pre-order, they, if they’re buying blind and you make u s A today, that is a hell of an achievement. Doesn’t matter if you’re one person. Doesn’t matter if you’re 20, cuz you have to convince readers to confidently buy on something they can’t see a preview of the product.
But when you think about it that way it’s really, it. This is one of the hardest careers you can subject onto yourself. It’s, it takes passion, it takes knowledge, it takes skill, it takes determination, it takes money.
My latest release coming out on the 16th, I’ve dumped like $7,000 into this book so far. And I hate done spending it. I ain’t done spending it. I will make a profit on it, but this book was expensive cuz it’s 145,000 words long. Oh, so the editing, yep. Yep. Editing the audio print editions, the spec, the advertising.
Cause I will be doing some advertising on this. Not a whole lot. It’s so deep into the series that it’s hard to advertise. Yeah. Especially you’re mainly
your existing readers. You’re mainly trying to get people who may have fallen off on book three maybe to come back in, Hey, there’s a new one out.
Keep
finish it. Yeah. It does help that I’ve announced when the series is ending there’s a whole trend of where if you’re deep into a long series and they’re not sure how many books are left, they get uncomfortable. They don’t want to necessarily buy unless they’re really interested in that title, and then they’ll wait until the final book is dropped.
Then by everything, this is a pretty well known syndrome, death Kiss to many a series. I can think of numerous series that I bought loyally, but no one else did. And then you can’t blame the publishers for dropping it In my case, I’m doing it cuz I really want to, and I would just pillage the money from the other series to continue.
In cases like this, the, my vigilante Magical Librarian series is getting pillaged from other series to pay for it because the sell through rate was garbage. It happens. If I were a traditional publisher, it would’ve been cut off at the second book, but I’m not So I can finish. The whole five series, five book series is planned, but the investments are quite up there.
This is, it’s brutally hard. It’s brutally hard. I got insanely lucky and I’m one of those people where I’m not insanely lucky. I just threw a lot of money at the problem. I learned from my mistakes. I learned a lot from my mistakes, a lot of mistakes. If I had to pick a mistake, it was actually doing a u s A today run as a group.
It doesn’t help you. The title does you no good unless you heard it yourself. I know people are so in love with the title, but you are not getting the readers off of the group activities unless you’re like four or five people. And then people tend to read the entire anthology. But really what happens with most anthologies I’ve been in is the readers buy the anthology for the one or two authors they really wanna read in that anthology.
Some will read all of them, very few jump ship. I’ve done this experiment enough times, but it’s played out the same way every single time. The two times I did novel length features in a group, I was running tracking links on everything I did to promote it, and we were given the numbers of the sales and I pulled down a quarter of the sales for both sets.
And that was tracked sales. So when you run affiliate tracking links, they don’t give you credit for every single sale. It’s usually 50% less than what I actually bring in. Can be quartered to 50% depending on the source. Because what they do is if they determine that a friend of yours click the link, you don’t get credit for it.
So if they have a known relationship, like they track through Facebook, so Amazon and Facebook have a relationship, they go, does this advertiser know this person? And they’ll go, yes, it doesn’t count. So the tracking links are only as good as the new people you reach with them. So in this case, I brought in a quarter of the leads of people I didn’t know.
So that’s actually a really solid number, but I invested a lot of money to make that happen. And I’m glad I did it. I’m glad for those who feel they got something out of doing the sets, but I quickly learned that I didn’t have value from it until I earned it myself. No. That’s when I started making the real money.
The first run I did by myself on a sales. That’s where the money came from because they’re buying that book just for me, just for that book. Then they’re more likely to buy through the rest of my books. And I invested $20,000 on that run. Wow. And I made over $80,000 as a result.
That’s a good
return.
That’s a good return. The return was great. The return was great. One, the two runs I did as group anthologies, large scale group mythologies. I think there’s 20 to 25 people in those sets. I invested 10 to 15,000 each. Earned back 1500. Ooh. Yeah. So not a great return. It was no return. It was loss.
That’s, yeah. It didn’t, I got a few readers out of it, but not to the level of what they tend to pitch. Oh, let’s do this wholesale thing as mythology. Save the money and do your own do your own advertising. Yeah. Then you have a better chance of better returns and you’re cultivating readers who are there because they wanna read your book.
They’re not there because they wanna read like in an anthology set. They’re not there cuz they wanna read my book or the another person’s book in the set. I’ve had a successful set. I curated the dirty deeds anthologies. We did two of them and we actually did great sharing with each other. Because we all brought in our fan bases and we made the efforts of going why we liked everybody else in the set.
So because we’re vouching for everybody else who was in the set, we were sharing what everybody else was doing. We all benefited. We did those for fun though. We didn’t really do those to hit. Yeah, we hit on the first the first one two of the ladies didn’t have their letters yet, and we were like we’re having fun and we’re close, so let’s advertise release week.
So we did, and we got lucky and we hit it was very much a, let’s see if this works at the very last minute. So I’m like, I didn’t study for this test, I wasn’t prepared. So I’m like, okay, here we go. Here’s the money we’re gonna spend. We all decide as a group. And then we were like, okay, let’s try it. And we tried it.
And then the second anthology is we’re just here to have some fun, make a little bit of money, have some fun continue on for one last hip, hip raw. And so we did, and it was great fun. We didn’t list, but it was also a Scholastic book week. Yeah. We need a lot of sales to hit on a Scholastic book week.
Usually around 7,500 if you’re going on a Scholastic book week. I have hit on a Scholastic book week though I don’t know how, but I did once. I’m like, oh, I found out. Oh, it’s Scholastic book. I’m screwed.
So would you say it was like going for these US today bestselling lists that what, what is, after all these experiments, you’ve run all these trials and errors, what was the thing that was able to get you.
You’re a fan base. The, there’s obviously multiple things, but was it this list strategy when it was just you going for it? That worked?
The group wants that, that did work. That did work fantastically well. Don’t get me wrong. That is a very solid strategy to establishing a pen name or establishing a main brand.
If you have the 10 to $20,000 and you take the time to learn how to run a Facebook ad experiment at like $5. If you can’t get your ccpc to 15 cents, you probably don’t wanna throw the money away. If your books are consistently well reviewed and rated, if you have a decent self through and you’re wide, then doing the listing strategy is fantastic because those are the kind of readers.
Said buy wide books. I don’t know much about the KU strategy. It’s not something I’ve done since 2017, and I found out I don’t write the right type of book for ku. I don’t have the angst and drama and I don’t write cliffhangers. And those things helped make KU books sell really well. So in my case, it was very strange.
I got frustrated with KU cuz my sales were low and I was like, you know what? Screw it. I’m just gonna go wide and start over. It turns out my core readers were reading in KU when they were buying book buyers. So I pulled the plug on all my KU books, put them wide, and then released the second magical romantic comedy book and it sold really well.
And I went, what? What’s going on here? I got very confused because it just overnight exploded. I went from earning less than a thousand dollars a month to five to $10,000 a month.
Just, that’s a big shift next month.
Wow. Just like whatever. Just from going wide. Just from going wide. Because I present like a traditionally published author.
Traditionally published readers aren’t KU readers for the most part. They’re used to buying their books. They’re used to checking out who’s the publisher, who like looking at the samples. They really don’t like typos, they don’t like grammar errors. So I was presenting more like a traditionally published author cuz that’s how I learned to write.
I had wanted originally to go traditional. I had some bites, but my husband was like, Take a shit or get off the pot, and I’m like, Hey, let’s go. Gimme some money. I wasn’t working at the time. I’ve been laid off and he’s okay, here’s some seed money. Go play. And it ended up working out. The first few years were hard because I think it took me three years to get momentum, but I learned a lot in those three years.
So they’re mandatory. It’s very hard. Before that first book you published to really understand what’s involved with writing a good book, what is going to make the difference between a struggling author and a successful author is the struggling author will write books, but they’re not writing books to, with the intent of trying to write a better book than the last one they wrote.
That’s really hard. Like I put a lot of pressure on myself because I want to entertain my readers. So when I’m writing and publishing a book, That’s always at the forefront of mine. How can I make the book experience even better? And there are times where I don’t succeed at this whatsoever, but I’m always trying, I’m always trying to make sure fewer typos than in the previous book.
I don’t give a rats ass if a reader doesn’t like regionalism. They can call it a grammar if they want, but if a character’s from the south, that character’s dropping to be, and I don’t particularly care if the reader doesn’t like it. That’s how the character would speak or that’s how their narrative would sound.
I try to keep true to the characters in each one. I don’t like self inserting stuff. Food and cars. I destroy. Those are the things I selfer. If you see a character going after tacos, I was either eating a taco or I wanted a taco. I’m not even lying. Chicken nuggets. I did selfer one thing in a book because it was just too funny not to.
When I was little, I got a raw chicken nugget from McDonald’s and got salmonella poisoning. I put that in a book because it was horrible and I’m like, oh, this is a great way to torture this character. This fits really well in this book. I’m sorry Ginger, but you’re getting salmonella and we’re gonna have fun with this.
Cause you know, I didn’t have to research jack’s shit to know what happened with that. I knew exactly how we were playing out. It was miserable. It was miserable, and I enjoyed making that character suffer. I’m like, ah, that week of suffering has finally paid off. But I don’t like to do stuff like that.
I want to write about people who are not me. And that’s part of the fun. And I think part of why it works when I’m writing a book, I’m exploring this character’s life. I don’t want this life. No. I don’t wanna be any character in my books. My ideal day is gimme some diamond, give me a book and some hot chocolate.
Give me some cats and just leave me alone. I’m an introvert. I’m like, I’m gonna get off this call and be like, I’m done for the next three weeks. Thank you. Just run and hide. It’s like where did my wife go? My husband will ask under the bed. Quite possibly under the bed with the cats. But it’s hard and people are like, oh yeah, be an author.
It’s easy. No. It’s hard. And I’m, as you were mentioning before, I try to be honest about just about everything I do. Readers value that they like when authors are honest with them. And if you are doing something like a subscription service, you need to be true to yourself.
Cause readers can smell a bullshit 10 miles away and if you feed them, people are very good at that. Yeah. If you feed them enough bullshit, they’re going to think you’re bullshit. So if you’re going that route, be honest, be frank with ’em, don’t lie. If you are not sure you’re gonna meet a deadline, just be honest about it.
They’re going to respect you saying an uncomfortable truth a lot more than they’re going to respect you covering that. You screwed something up. Just say you screwed something up. If you’re going to go the subscription model, people like the personalities. If you can’t carry off a personality, don’t do it.
Just be you, because that’s the easiest personality to show. And if your personality isn’t able to go, let’s do a q and a. What do we got going on here? Let’s be silly. Let’s have a serious and frank discussion. Let’s, if you can’t do all of the moons, the readers are gonna notice. If you’re always perky and you never show that something’s ever wrong, they’re going to wonder.
They’re going to have questions and they’re not going to think you’re authentic. I only update them if something’s going to change. Like recently on the per novel, I said, okay, I am changing to the charge posts. The charge posts will have the book copies available and the message will be sent with the book links at the same time the charge post happens.
That means I’m not gonna be pre-scheduling a charge post with no links and doing the extra stuff. It’s just gonna be charge post book. The book will file vanish after two to three weeks. They know this going in cuz I don’t. You can’t just sign up and then get every book that’s ever happened. I send messages and those messages expire after two to three weeks.
The book files themselves are removed after three weeks. So that protects me from people who sign up wanting to get the whole backlog, cuz that’s a well known problem in Patreon. The monthly users have the same three week access. They’re also messaged with a book Funnel Link and it keeps piracy down.
Now piracy is actually a big problem in Patreon. Found this out. First time I did a book release, I have a Discord channel. It’s called Fantasy Worlds of RJ Blain because that’s my little go-to slogan thingy, whatever. Cuz I can’t write just one world. What are you talking about? And someone pirated the Patreon copy to my discord.
Ooh,
that’s not fun.
My friend Katie, who helps me run it was like, are you fucking serious? Because she did it right in front of me. Yeah. And I’m like, Katie, I dunno which buttons to hit. Can you make this person go away please? And I made a very blunt post on Patreon and on my website about it, and it hasn’t happened since which is good, but I had to set my foot down and go, okay, you either don’t load it to pirate sites or you don’t pirate it.
And we keep going on or somebody else does it and we stop. And they chose to stop which is good. But now I was going to give the book to them like several weeks in advance. They get it three to four days now, cuz that just limits the chance of it hitting a pirate site before our fish release. So you need to go unaware that this does happen.
And sometimes yeah, it’s a core reader who is giving your book away for free. And it was a very unwelcome wake up call. But that is a risky take with Patreon. Has it roared book sales for me? No. No. I have found with 500 roughly people who are getting the novels in advance, I may have taken a 200 reader hit in terms of sales.
So there’s 300 people on my Patreon roughly, who are also buying on the vendor sites. I keep telling them, don’t do this, sweetie. Don’t. And they’re like, but I want them in my serious thing on them. Salon. I’m like, Okay. All right. I can’t argue with that cause I’ve done it myself. Like I’ve literally, I’m on Patreon of some authors and I have very literally gone and bought the retail copy.
So my series section is complete. There you have it. It happens and you’re gonna be very confused about it cuz you’re doing the Patreon to often save them money. Yeah. Or give them that extra content and then they will just do stuff like sign up for the per novel and the per or month patreons and then get confused and you can’t talk them out of it.
So don’t try. Just thank them. Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. Yeah. Just thank them. Yeah. If you give them more ways to pay you, I have found they will take advantage of giving you extra money. That, but that’s a core reader thing. If Paton models work for you, you’ll wanna look into Kickstarters as well.
Don’t be like me and go. If we hit these benchmarks, I will add my entire back list to these. Don’t do that. I’m still trying. It’s was supposed to be 28 books going into print. It ended up being over 60 and that extended my delivery time by a year. Cause it’s a lot of design work and, but if you’re finding that you have a Patreon audience, you very probably have a Kickstarter audience as well.
And you have a cat. This is Princess. Ha. This is my girl. She’s my hi. Hi. So cute. And yeah, she’s me girl. This is one of the writers,
yes. You’ll have to, you have to subscribe to get her writings.
Yeah. She is very much Feed me. Can I have some food now? Why have you not fed me? Mom where’s my food mom?
It’s not supposed to be fed in for 30 more minutes, but I’m hungry now. Mom, that was last night. That was last night. She was like, I want my food early. And she got it early. We’re pushovers. . So what it does is remove financial stress. Yeah. And I’m very open about that. Like this helps pay my bills. This pays most of my bills. And I use all the vendor money to keep writing.
And whatever profit I get is, my take home pay. But that Patreon pays my bills and the like, they know that this is how it works. The Paton goes to pay my bills so I can keep writing the vendor stuff is where I actually, get to put money into retirement. Cuz I’m an author, I don’t get a 401k or whatever they’re called.
I have to throw it in a savings account and pray. I never get sick when I get old. Cuz I don’t get any of the retirement benefits, right? Yeah. And so I’m leaning down cause my cat wants to be pet and she’s under my lap desk. She’s a good girl, but she’s very needy. She’s like 16, 15, 16 years old now.
So what she wants is she gets, that’s how this household works. The cat rules it and we just live here. But the financials are hard as an author it took three and a half, four years to start actually making profit. So everything before that was just investment. We took out our savings account or extra money, or I worked editing books to earn, to be able to publish.
And after the three and a half, four years, that’s when I actually started making money. And it snowballed. It went from like my earnings bar goes like this. And then when I left, KU went like this and then it went like this and it went like this. And then when I stopped publishing for a while it goes down.
Cuz most authors, that three week window I was talking about is real. And you will see it in yours go like a month is like this and then it just goes down and nobody really warns you about that when you’re going into it. New releases are your lifeblood and it’s very expensive to boost your old titles.
I do a lot of old title boosting and low numbers cause I can make profit off the book itself. So in that case it’s great advertising cuz anything that’s to sell through is extra profit. That’s the way to go. If you are on a very tight budget ROI positive campaigns, lost lead campaigns are like what you would do for a U S USA today run.
You invest tw like $20,000, expecting not to earn $20,000 back on a 99 cent sale. Contemporary romance you can actually make profit on 99 cent sales. The romance genre is just voracious readers everywhere. My genre not so much. It’s very hard to do a 99 cent profit run. So I do lost lead campaigns.
I know I can spend $10 a lead and make money afterwards. Yeah, so I’m playing the long game. Every time I do a sale like that I’m hoping somebody may find my Patreon or I’m hoping that they’ll just buy through the series and I make my money back that way. If you’d let go of my hand, princess, you wouldn’t have to hiss at me.
She’s holding my hand and is mad at me because I was having my hand near her. Welcome the cats. And now she doesn’t have my hands cuz I, I want to preserve them. But the money is weird in advertising for books. If you can do a lost campaign, what you are doing is you are gambling that you have written a good enough book that they want to buy the next book right away.
That is the name of the game. If you’re doing an ROI positive like slow burn campaign, you are monitoring your sales for if your advertising is making immediate profit, full price right away. So I do both styles. I find the full price campaigns are slower, but you’re more likely to get the sell through so they can make a lot of profit.
It’s very hard to ramp those up, though. That’s what the traditional market does. They are very much, we are gambling that we know that this book is good enough to sell at payback prices. They advertise to the places that sell to readers who buy like that. So libraries newspapers with the review sections.
Their mailing lists, which are very much rigged to get to the people who buy books, book sellers. So you won’t see a whole lot of advertising from a traditional publisher that way. You won’t go on Facebook and see a traditionally published book giving a lot of ad traffic. You won’t sp see a lot of sponsored ads.
I can’t remember the last time I saw sponsored ad for a traditional book on Facebook. I don’t remember the last time I saw it on Amazon either, because that’s not where they’re advertising. Indies don’t have access to those venues very well though. So we have to rely on things like Facebook, et cetera through Ingram Spark.
You can get into the library system and yes, those $80 plug adss absolutely work. If you can go USA Today, bestselling author because librarians look for that. Now here’s the thing. Librarians also look to confirm how you got your letters. So if they see you’re only in an anthology, they’re probably gonna pass on it from the, for the library.
If they see you’re been on there multiple times by yourself, they will buy the book for the library. New series, they’re hit or miss on. But that is one of the tricks and Indy can use to reach the traditional market. Promoting your title through Ingram Spark. It is expensive and it is a gamble. You don’t know how that librarian acquisitions librarian is gonna look at your book, but if you have a good cover, you have a librarian friend, you can ask, Hey, if you were in acquisitions, how would you phrase the catch for Ingrams Park?
I have leaned on a few librarian friends for that in the past and it works. If you know a librarian and you are an author, ask for help. They will help you and tell you what sells a book, cuz their job is literally to buy books for their patrons. Talk to them. Librarians are absolutely happy to help you.
They may not buy your book from the library, but they will tell you what they look for. And that was one of the most helpful things they’ve ever done was school would just ask a librarian. Ask your librarian, ask your local librarian. Ask if you see a random librarian on the internet, go, Hey, do you have a minute?
Can I talk to you about librarian stuff? They’re usually happy to talk to you. They love books. They’re not sh if you love books and wanna be a librarian, don’t tell them in the interview that you love books, and that’s why you wanna be a librarian. It’s a good way to not become a librarian because librarians are a public service.
Yes, books are involved, but librarians are a public service. Things you learn from your local librarian, by the way. But yeah it’s a very strange world in the traditional sense. So if you want to get your books into libraries, talk to librarians. If you wanna get your books into book sellers, you talk to the book sellers learn what they’re looking for.
It’s not the same as what indies do to get their book solo on Amazon. Or any of the other vendors.
And this is another reason why you were saying like your core readers cover the bills in a sense because of your subscriptions.
That Yeah. Is to have a relationship and have a space where your core readers supports you, no matter what happens on these platforms. Because frankly, we don’t control what happens in these platforms. We can’t control. That relationship with our readers. This has been, what a wide ranging conversation.
Rj, this was so generous for you to share all of this with us. Thank you so much. You’re
welcome.
Where can we find you online? Where can people listening find you
online? The sneaky kitty critic.com is my blog and that’s where I funnel everything. And I recently opened a website called I found a stick.com, and I take pictures of sticks and writes about the sticks I find and I have a whole cue of sticks.
I have to show up, but I’ll decide. No, screw it. I have this really nice camera and I like taking it on walks. And I keep finding really interesting sticks in pine cones and stupid little, I love it. That. And so now I take pictures of sticks.
I’m going to that website right now. That intrigues me.
I wanna see your sticks.
One of the best sticks that I found was I found this really cool log, right? And I’m like shit, I can’t find any lizards to take pictures of. And every time my husband would point out a lizard, a little shit would run off and I wasn’t able to get shots of the lizard. So I’m taking pictures of this really cool log.
There was a lizard on the log and I didn’t notice it. Yeah. Sticks. The mother of sticks. Specifically in that case, I had to fix my blog cuz the pictures weren’t showing on one of the posts. I’m like, oh no, my are missing. I had to re photos.
I know you got a romance author, but if I must say these are some beautiful stick pics.
Thank you.
Scroll down. You can see the lizard. And I didn’t notice the lizard. My husband didn’t load us the lizard. I’ll get my camera home. Take the memory card. I’m all sad cause I have all these blurry pictures of lizards and I have this one decent shot, but he’s framed by a bunch of leaves and all you can see is a little litter guy.
I’m like, oh shit. And then I’m looking at, oh, time to go through my sticks cuz I took a lot of pictures of sticks and then love it. What the hell is on my stick lizard? Are you fucking kidding me? Perfect. Focus on the lizard. I didn’t even see the lizard. My camera saw the lizard though. And the camera must my focus on the lizard because it was just like, oh, okay.
She obviously wants to take pictures of this. Not the stick.
And then I’m stomping around my apartment at that point going fucking lizard. It was hilarious. Cause I was like, I was so sad I hadn’t gotten a picture of a lizard and turns out I had gotten a picture of a lizard. I just hadn’t known it. And that was also the first day I ever took a good picture of a bird flight.
Love that. Wow. You’re awesome. I, yeah, I found
a stick. That’s what a place,
talk about just taking something mundane and running with it. Yeah.
That’s like what you could do with like your cats and your subscription. Like this, the same kind of thing. This just beautiful. Tha thank you so much RJ for all this.
I had a great time. And You’re welcome. I hope everyone listening Did too. Thank you.
And that was it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it, and this, Alan, is one of many that we’re uploading now. We’ve had a backlog of episodes for like the last couple months. So, I’ve been uploading a lot of episodes to the feed, so if you’re seeing a bunch of episodes at once, I am sorry, we will catch back up, and in the meantime, so grateful for all of you being here, the podcast has grown a lot, the community has grown a lot over the last year, and we’re just so excited to double down and make it even better in 2024.
So, have an amazing rest of your day, have a great time writing, and as always, don’t forget, storytellers rule the world.