Posted on February 27, 2024
In today’s episode, Michael dives into the top 10 tier benefits for author subscriptions. Tune in as he breaks down each benefit, providing practical advice on how to approach and implement them for maximum success.
#70 Transcript:
[00:00:00] Welcome to Subscriptions for Authors. Meet your co hosts, Michael Evans, sci fi thriller author of a dozen novels, and Amelia Rose, a semi romance author that makes six figures per year in subscriptions. Together, we will help you make more money with subscriptions and succeed in the future of publishing.
Michael Evans: And welcome back to the descriptions for authors podcast. And this is episode three now of the storytellers rule of the world diary. It’s a weekly episode just for me to you, and I’m doing this. And this is going to be helpful advice for subscriptions because consistency actually like isn’t fully my strong suit But if I like box myself in and tell myself I have to record at this time at this day Every week it actually is very helpful for me and being more creative.
So sometimes structure breeds creativity at least for me So I have this weekly recording session and then I’m sure I’ll be recording plenty of interviews In [00:01:00] fact, we already have with other amazing authors. So If anything, this just means more episodes for you all. And, as we’ve said, these episodes will be a little bit shorter, but will be focused on a theme or topic that has come up in my life that I want to share with all of you that hopefully can help you have better subscriptions and better careers as authors.
So, what, what are we talking about today? It’s the top 10 tier benefits for authors. And I have a list here. I want to share with you. And basically, this list is ranked, not in an arbitrary way, but in terms of the tier benefits that we see driving most revenue on Reem. So, this is really a good way to kind of gauge what broadly readers are interested in.
There’s one caveat to this, one very important caveat, which is this list is Across all genres across, you know, all different types of authors, all different stages of their career. So if you look at this [00:02:00] list and are like, Oh my God, like, since this was the tier benefit number one, I guess I have to do this.
The answer is no, no, just because it’s the number one tier benefit on the list. Just because this is the thing that most authors are utilizing, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. And maybe you have a tier of an idea that isn’t on this list at all, and it doesn’t fit into the top ten. Guess what? It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.
It can be a great idea. This is, again, just aggregate numbers, aggregate stats. And the goal is hopefully to help all of you figure out what you want your tier description to be.
Michael Evans: So what is to your benefit number one and this is not going to come to surprise if you’ve listened to the podcast before but I want to talk about why I’m not just going to talk about like list them in like a minute. I actually want to elaborate on each of these and how to approach it. So this first one is early access and this is largely the most [00:03:00] popular.
Because there’s the highest proportion of authors offering it. If you were to look at a hundred subscription pages, the most common benefit you would see would be early access. And as a result, since it’s a very common benefit authors offer, it’s a very common benefit readers subscribe to. As well, it’s something that’s, you know, somewhat easy for readers to understand. Readers already want your stories. Hopefully. So early access allows them to get access to those stories before they are published elsewhere. Seems simple enough. Well, what we see here is that there’s actually a few kinds of early access. You know, the most common one that we see is the chat by chapter, serialized early access, where maybe over the course of three months you’re publishing a few chapters a week.
of your story as you move on to another story in the next couple of months. And, and that’s a great model. That’s a great model. You might keep your tiers open so people can sign up anytime. The [00:04:00] second model we see is still serialized chat by chapter access. But instead of leaving your tiers open where readers can sign up anytime, you actually open them.
By having the tiers, you know, be on your public page for maybe the first two weeks that you’re serializing the book. And then you archive the tiers so that new members can’t sign up, but you can still publish chapters to existing members. Kat T. Mason does this. She’s an incredible dark romance author.
And, you know, this, this strategy is limited time, early access. And it, it works very, very well. We’ve seen that become more common. Then, the third way you can do early access is instead of offering a serializer chapter by chapter, you just offer the whole novel, the whole story, or a larger chunk of the story.
In one go. So those are like the different ways that you can approach it. You know, the biggest thing about subscriptions is testing your tier benefits, testing what you’re doing to see like what works best, right? And early access is the kind of thing that I feel like most people can try.
It has very little [00:05:00] downside because you’re already releasing those books elsewhere. You already spent the time in writing the book, so it’s not actually taking that much extra production time. Ideally, you enjoy doing that because you enjoy writing and it’s okay if you don’t. There’s some people who actually like hate the drafting process and are like, I love ideation. I’m not trying to shame you at all for what you enjoy, but for most authors, it tends to be a good strategy.
Tier Relevant number two. Now, this one might be surprising to some, it might not be surprising to some, because it’s actually a Tier Relevant that me and Amelia, like, regularly actually discourage authors to do, and I want to caveat this benefit by saying that we have ranked this based on the gross revenue.
We aren’t actually able to tell the net profit that authors make from their tears because we don’t have access to the back end financials of authors. You know, what, what are they spending on art? What are they spending on editing? What are they spending on merch [00:06:00] boxes and things of that nature? So all I will say here is that this might be the. You know, second highest in terms of volume, but it might actually not be the second highest in terms of profit for authors, you know, I, I actually don’t know the answer to that and don’t necessarily have an easy way of collecting that in a way that would not violate privacy laws and privacy is more important than Us, you know, being able to present, you know, gross profit versus net profit, right?
So regardless of that, and I know I’m throwing these profit terms around, gross profit is just like what you make after fees. Net profit is like what you actually keep, right? It’s what you actually take home. So net profit is what matters. And with these tiers, what I’m about to mention is tier number two.
The tiers that drive the most revenue are, you know, merchandise. Book boxes and we, we see these do very well, specifically because authors are able to offer these tiers anywhere from a [00:07:00] minimum of really $25 a month to as much as we’ve seen $250 a month. Now these are like glammed out incredible book boxes, but that’s the rate we’ve seen anywhere from 25 to $250 a month.
So in $25 a month usually is like a book box every quarter. And the $280 a month one is a book box every month. So that gives you the range of things. So obviously these are drawing like incredible volume in terms of like. You know, actual revenue and you know, gross profit for the authors. But in terms of net profit, it’s, it’s tough to say, like I said, I don’t actually know, but these are interesting benefits.
I mentioned it as number two because it is, but I wouldn’t actually like rank this as the number two benefit. I think people should get into like with early access. I was like, I think you should probably. Consider that. I think it’s a good thing to consider. It might not work for you, but it’s at least worth trying with this.
If you’re getting started, you have to think about like all the costs that goes into like creating just one book box, like designing it, picking out like what goes in it, picking out the design and things that you’re seeing with merch, and if you’re going to sell just one, [00:08:00] there’s a lot of like setup costs where it might not actually be worth the time and the stress for just one, I’d recommend if you think you could have like.
10 subscribers on a tier that would offer this, I think it’s then worth your while. And I would even cap it in the beginning at 10 or something like that to get them in quickly so that you’re able to like actually make it worth your while from day one. 10 is my number, 5 would be the absolute minimum.
If you’re above 10, like that’s a really great tier. You can be making 100 a month from something like this. At five, it can still be worth it. The only reason I question even five is like your time spent writing and your brain energy going there is so valuable that five might not be worth it for a lot of folks, but 10, 10 almost certainly is.
But of course this scales with your career size. Like if an author’s making seven figures a year, if they only get 10 people to book box, you know, extra, extra, you know, 500 a month of profit, although it sounds nice, an extra [00:09:00] 300 for the profit, whatever it ends up being, although it sounds nice. Like if you’re making. A million dollars a year, that’s actually not that much.
Then again, an author making a million dollars a year might be able to make six figures from a book box, right? Which in that case, it’s actually probably pretty significant. So, I say this all to, you know, put my caveats in, always let you know that Just because you hear a number, doesn’t mean you should go off and do it, but instead reflect on your personal situation, what makes sense for you, your stage of your career, and what you enjoy.
With all that said, let’s tier benefit number two.
Let’s tier benefit number three that we see. So tier benefit number three is access to backlist. And this doesn’t have to be your entire backlist. Just like early access, there’s kind of, you know, iterations within this. So the first thing, in terms of the backlist access, would be access to Your entire back catalog all of it in one go readers can subscribe and as you add to the backlist they’ll get potentially access to that and [00:10:00] When they unsubscribe, they don’t have access to your backlist anymore. They don’t get to read those stories. So it’s, it, that’s interesting model. And Amelia does this. Lynn’s launch does this with a lot of her stories, not all, but a lot. Plenty of authors do this model. And I think it’s actually very smart because the whole goal is to get someone hooked onto the backlist so that they want to stay for more frontlist content.
And they become a loyal super fan who might even upgrade to higher tiers. It’s very smart. Like if you get someone to binge 30 of your books, like, it’s like your own mini KU, right? Now, there’s another way to do it too. Which is, instead of offering access to your entire backlist, maybe it’s just to one series.
At a time. Maybe it’s one new book a month from your backlist that your readers get to vote on. These are, these are some of the things that we see.
Okay, so tier benefit number four is not gonna be surprising to folks, and it’s kind of like a category benefit. But it’s a really important category of benefits, which is bonus content. And [00:11:00] bonus content can range from, you know, one shots, short stories, like we see folks like Jack Steen and Damien from G. U. T. S. do.
It can be character profiles. It can be a ton of different things. But, This, this is a big one. This is definitely one that we see readers be interested in, but there’s a caveat here, which is that it has to be worth your time to create these things that are outside of your, like, your functional, like, main storyline, right?
And if you enjoy this and you create it naturally in your writing process, there’s a little downside, but if you are creating it and are spending a ton of time on it, And not making much money from it, then, you know, it’s a, it’s a higher risk type of thing. And I say higher risk not in a bad way, but just knowing, so you know the real cost that goes into producing a tier.
Like this, but it’s, it’s, it’s great. I recommend it to folks who, who think that they can get interested in it. [00:12:00] And this is the kind of thing that can be like really worthwhile to test, right? And see, Oh, let me, let me try doing a little bit of this. And then if they’re interested in it, then that’s great.
And this kind of goes nicely into tier benefit. Number five, the most. popular, fifth most popular one, which is what I’m going to call exclusive content. And the easiest way to describe exclusive content versus bonus content and early access is an exclusive story is only going to be on your subscription for like a length of time.
Like early access is like 30 days and then you roll it out, right? And they kind of know, like, I’m just getting it early. An exclusive story may only be on your subscription, period. I mean, you have the rights to your work. You get to decide if you want to move it out. And you can always move it out. I should be very clear about that.
But maybe you’re like planning to have this story in your subscription for a year, for two years. Where like the only place they can get this is inside your subscription. That we see very, very effective. Authors like Ava and Ellis do this. Authors like Elena Johnson have begun doing similar approaches in terms of creating, you know, whether it’s a [00:13:00] second series that builds off a main series that you know your readers are going to be interested in.
Whether it’s a novella tied to your main storyline. There’s a lot of different ways you can approach it. This is a big one. That’s a big one. I actually really like it. I like it for a very specific kind of use case. We know this isn’t a secret. For most authors, if they write like five different series of books, let’s say 40 books over like a five or six year period, there’s going to be probably one series, maybe two, that drive 60 to 70 percent, potentially even 80 percent of the author’s revenue.
But those other three series, they’re probably like, Doing well, fans to like them. You may have loved writing them, but they’re not as like profitable. They’re not driving as much discovery. Yet, they’re really valuable for your existing fans. And we have to remember what subscriptions are. Subscriptions are about serving your existing audience.
So this exclusivity to your subscription is a way to actually take a series that might not perform as well in the general market, but might perform really well with your existing fan base and actually be able to Generate more revenue from that because [00:14:00] they’ll be paying a premium to receive an exclusive story that others can’t receive and You’ll actually be able to make writing something like this even more worth your time So that’s the best way to approach number five and it’s it’s useful exclusive stories exclusive novels
So what is number six? What’s number six? Number six is art. Number six is art and a lot of readers love art There’s actually some like popular subscriptions that are just like artists creating fan art based on stories they love. So there’s like, it’s clearly a lot of demand for this and authors create this type of art too.
Usually most authors hire it out. Some authors don’t, it depends on your skillset, but these can be popular, especially not safe work art for romance readers. We, we definitely see that being, being a thing that people enjoy. It’s something that we are always welcome to have on Ream. And with that, the caveat is this.
[00:15:00] As long as it can be expensive, to get a great artist, and rightfully so, like, it’s not cheap. It’s not cheap, right? It’s not cheap, and doing so could really potentially decrease the profit of your tier, right? So there’s a few ways to go about this. One is kind of taking the approach of when I have ten paid subscribers, that tier, it actually might be worthwhile.
You can actually create the tier. And actually like mention explicitly with like a tier limit of 10 and say like when the limit runs out, I’ll actually start, you know, creating art and commissioning art. But until then, you know, if you sign up for this tier, you’re kind of just supporting me and letting me know that like you’re ready for it.
And maybe anyone who joins before the 10 gets like an extra few pieces of art for helping you get there. I know that sounds like almost wild, but you’re basically pre launching your tier. Right pre launching it here to see if there’s demand for it. As long as you’re open with your readers about this You can do this with any of these ideas.
Oh, I want to go do a book box But I’m not sure if I [00:16:00] have enough readers. Okay, pre launch it. Say if we get 10, I’ll do it If not, you know, you can refund the money or you could say it’s just extra support or when we do hit 10 I’ll give you like the extra best box ever It’s up to you and how you want to run your business.
So the tier benefit number seven, tier benefit number seven is one that probably is not surprising. And it’s one that we see be surprisingly common, which is community events and there’s kind of two main types of community events that we see. The first kind are like live events with the author. Think, you know, A monthly Zoom call, where maybe you bring your readers together, there could be, there could be, you know, different types of personality quizzes you give your readers connected to your world, which at some point I’m going to do a whole thing through type form about how to do that, but I don’t have time during this 30 minute ish podcast to do that, but the whole point is [00:17:00] that you will actually have a space That your readers can come to and events taking place that bring them together.
So one is like live virtual calls through Zoom. And especially our pearls. Think, you know, coffee chats with Christopher. There’s a few, there’s a few other pearls. But he’s the one that we definitely all know and love. Like they will be definitely like best suit for that kind of Kenny engagement. And I, and I love that.
But if you’re off the persona, which if you haven’t taken the other person’s quiz, you can somewhere in the description, there’ll be that link. There’ll also be the link to join our Facebook group where you can actually share some of your ideas around this, because I’d love to hear like your reaction to this podcast and like how this changed, how you think about to your benefits. So do let me know that’s in the Facebook group. And then as always, if you actually want to go create your tears, you can go to re totally free to create an account. We just take 10 percent of the revenue you make and we. Not only help you set up an amazing inscription, but also help you grow with discovery on the platform.
When it comes to this tier benefit number seven, the CUNY engager, the CUNY benefits, you know, the big, big, big thing is doing, engaging in [00:18:00] a way that like works best for you and that actually interests your readers. And live calls are far from the only way. You might be doing polls that, you know, are able to be based on your worlds, things of that nature.
You might be doing book clubs where readers can comment inside of your stories and you’re able to leave annotated copies, respond to their comments, and you know, you get to come together as a community and read like a whole new book from your backlist each month. Or even a book from another author that they could buy separately that you’re going to discuss in your community.
There’s lots of different ways to bring your community together. Different events you can do. Even you can encourage things like fan art and things of that nature. And it’s a lot of fun. So these are things that we see. And they’re the seventh most common to your benefit. Now the eighth most common to your benefit is audio.
And, you know, I think right now the reason that it’s eighth is mainly because, like, at the moment, Vream doesn’t make it super easy to do. And that’s going to be changing when we release audio in like the next 90 days. So, more from us soon, when we actually go and do that, I think you’ll [00:19:00] see, you’ll see how it changes in scope.
And that’ll be really, really fun. But in the meantime, It’s still popular to your benefit. Readers who read audiobooks, which I myself love listening to audiobooks, it’s a great benefit to either get the audiobook early, to get access to the backlist of audiobooks, whatever benefit you want to offer, benefits involving audio do tend to be popular.
And I like them as long as you’ve, like, produced an audiobook. It’s a pretty high leverage way to, like, increase the revenue of your subscription. If you, like, haven’t produced audiobooks yet, it comes to that same equation. Like, it could be expensive to do it. And that’s definitely something to keep in mind.
So, the ninth most common tier benefit is having, like, voting, or some sort of control or sway that readers have in your stories. And I want to be very, very clear here that this doesn’t mean that they actually get to, like I’m not going to be able to write the story with you or for you because that would be very concerning from an intellectual property law standpoint.
Never mind that it would infringe on your [00:20:00] own creative freedom. At least for me personally like part of being an indie author is like being able to call the shots and write what I want. Of course I want to write something that readers enjoy but like you know it’s kind of important. But, what I mean by this is saying hey.
Maybe your readers get to name a character. Maybe your readers get to pick a location for a specific type of restaurant your characters get to meet at, or have a date at, or The list goes on. Gamifying, you know, interaction in this way, with polls, is a very popular tier benefit, and sometimes authors will have the 5 tier be early access, and the 10 tier is early access with these voting rights.
So we see that be pretty common. I honestly love it, like, if you’re doing something like early access, or backlist, or something of that nature, if you want to get your fans It’s kind of like a perfect way to do so that like, realistically doesn’t take much time to create a poll. It’s going to take you like two or three minutes.
If that seriously, we’re not talking about creating like. You know, novel length polls here. This is like two sentences. What do you think about this, this and this? And then like, you [00:21:00] know, having the options. So I think it’s great. And we’re already at tier benefit number 10. I tell you these podcasts, they’re under 30 minutes.
Sometimes they’re, you know, even around 15 minutes and we’re going to pack a lot in, we’re going to pack a lot in and the 10th most common tier benefit. Is actually somewhat of a trick because I want to just list a bunch here and I don’t want to go into too detail of like other things we see. So obviously this isn’t like an all inclusive list, but there are some other things we see that like I think are important.
So one is like authors, you know, branching out into comic books as a medium and graphic novels and publishing those panels for either early access or bonus content in a subscription. So that, that’s a big one that, that we do see. Another one is discounts to direct stores, merch, et cetera. So maybe you don’t want to have explicitly a merch tier, but you want to give your readers a discount to merch, to book boxes that you’re selling [00:22:00] a la carte.
That, that works, that’s, that’s great. It’s definitely an option. The next one is being able to do things like collaborations with other authors. Maybe you’re doing like a cross promo or a cross hop that you’re only going to make available to, to paid members. So that encourages people to like, hey, if you want to get access to this amazing anthology or this amazing joint thing that we’re doing, you have to become paid members of, you know, someone’s ream to access that specific portion of it.
So, yeah, those are some other ideas. I could definitely keep going. And going, and going. I’ve seen people do recipe books, travel guides. The list is kind of limitless. You could do swag and things of that nature. Like stickers that you could put in a mail. You could do notes of your characters. I could go on and probably mention a hundred ideas.
This is where you come in. I want to hear your ideas and your call to action. I’m going to try and do a call to action at the end of every story. I was a little diary [00:23:00] is go post to the Facebook group. Some of your interesting story ideas tear ideas, go share with us. Like what, what do you, what do you, after listening to this podcast?
Or thinking about doing for your subscription. I’d love to hear it. I’d love if you’re starting a new tier. Let us know what you’re gonna do that new tier. If you’re not starting a new tier, if you’re starting your new subscription entirely, let us know what you’re thinking. We want to hear your tiers. We want to help you.
And the best way to do that is just to include it in a post. We love when authors share their tiers. We don’t count that as self promotion. Kind of frown against is if you’re going to just share your subscription link and tell us hey look at my tears and please subscribe That’s a like kind of crossing line.
I would recommend copying the copy of your tears into the post It takes like 30 seconds and then just putting it in Facebook as well Facebook Deprioritize post with links in it so you will get more visibility and more help if you take 30 extra seconds just to copy Your tears into a post. We also have a weekly to review feedback that we do where you actually can put your links and [00:24:00] that’s a great place as well.
That happens every Friday in the group and it’ll be pinned as a featured post in the group as well. But that said, we just actually hit 5, 000 members in the group. After this has been uploaded, we probably have over 5, 000 members out, which is crazy. So thank you so much for supporting what we’re doing here.
We’re really working hard to create a future where storytellers of the world. And we’re just the beginning phases of it. We’ve been working on this key for not even two years yet. And it feels like we’re at the beginning of something really, really special. So I can’t wait to see more of you soon. I’m excited for the summit where we get to come together in person, which if you don’t know about scriptures, rather summit we’ll leave a link to it.
Description. It’s amazing, amazing time. We have a virtual summit, but then also an in person summit too. And as always, I hope you have, you know, an amazing rest of your day. I hope you have a great time writing, and don’t forget, storytellers rule the world.
I’ll be back, I won’t let it fool me, I won’t give it [00:25:00] up, won’t let it fool me.