#3: How to Convert Readers to Your Subscription (LIVE Workshop with Kyra Fox)

Posted July 22, 2022

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One of the hardest things about setting up a subscription as an author is getting readers to pay you for it. In this 2 hour workshop, we do a deep dive into Kyra Fox’s subscription and help her grow it, so that you can too.

We are so grateful to Kyra and her bravery and time in doing this.

Please check her subscription out: https://www.patreon.com/kyrafoxauthor

And here’s her website: https://kyrafoxauthor.com/

And Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kyrafoxauthor/

#3 EPISODE OUTLINE:

• 0:00 – 3:00 Introduction and Context
• 3:04 – 7:22 Kyra’s Subscription and Writing Journey
• 7:22 – 8:10 The Importance of Consistency in Subscriptions
• 8:10 – 11:20 Kyra’s Experience Starting Subscriptions
• 11:20 – 13:20 Kyra’s Dream Author Lifestyle
• 13:20 – 20:15 Kyra’s Goal with her Subscription for Readers
• 20:15 – 25:18 The Lack of Discovery with Subscriptions
• 25:18 – 32:08 Diving into Kyra’s Subscription Tiers
• 32:10 – 34:10 Emilia’s Tier Feedback to Kyra
• 34:10 – 36:10 Michael’s Tier Feedback
• 36:10 – 39:54 How Authors Can Maximize High-Price Tiers
• 39:54 – 43:27 Making Subscription Benefits Clear to Readers
• 43:27 – 47:25 Why $1 Tiers May be a Bad Idea
• 47:25 – 54:08 How Kyra Promotes Her Books
• 54:08 – 1:02:50 How Kyra Networked with Bestsellers + Advice
• 1:02:50 – 1:06:40 How Kyra Built an Author Community on Instagram
• 1:06:40 – 1:08:45 How Promotes her Subscriptions
• 1:08:45 – 1:11:22 Why Community is a Superpower for Authors in Subscriptions
• 1:11:22 – 1:13:10 The Superfan Funnel into Your Subscription
• 1:13:10 – 1:18:50 How Kyra Builds Trust with her Readers
• 1:18:50 – 1:24:10 The Email That Got Kyra 5 of her 7 Subscribers
• 1:24:10 – 1:31:52 Giving Kyra Feedback on Her Subscription Launch Email
• 1:31:52 – 1:42:15 Reviewing Kyra’s Social Media Promotions
• 1:42:15 – 1:44:16 Thinking like an Author Creator
• 1:44:16 – 1:49:21 Reviewing Kyra’s Reels
• 1:49:21 – 1:52:27 How Kyra Has Fun With Marketing
• 1:52:27 – 1:58:24 Escaping the Gamification of Creativity
• 1:58:24 – 2:03:38 Running Your Indie Business on Your Own Terms
• 2:03:38 – 2:06:34 Kyra’s Takeaways and Conclusion

#3: Full Episode Transcript:

Michael Evans: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of the Subscriptions for Authors Podcast. Today, we’re gonna be talking all about how you can convert your readers to your subscription. I know it’s a big, complicated topic, but we actually had a good friend of ours, Kyra Fox post into our Subscriptions for Authors Facebook group, that she was having some troubles.

Michael Evans: If you’re watching the video version, I’ll put a screenshot here, but if you’re listening, the challenge is one that many of us face, which is having trouble getting people to go to her subscription page, to even begin to consider subscribing monthly. And then once they get there getting them to convert.

Michael Evans: So I felt really bad because I knew that problem really well and kind of face it in many ways, myself too. But I know how awesome Kyra is. She’s been our group for a long time and we just wanted to see if we could help her out. But that’s when I thought, why do this just between us that’s recorded. So that’s what you’ll see in this episode, I’ll be [00:01:00] coming at it from the perspective of an author.

Michael Evans: Who’s published 12 books, but hasn’t really yet made the full dive into subscriptions. But my co-host a Emil rose. She’s published almost 20 and makes over six figures a year in descriptions and has been doing it for three years now. So she’s very successful and we’ll have a two different perspectives to bring in that can hopefully help everyone listening, turn their readers into subscribers. I mean, what better way than a live workshop, right? It’s long it’s, it’s a big boy. It’s beefy. So I’m gonna get a little run through before you get into the next two hours about how you can maybe maximize your time here. And I’ll just wanna say upfront biggest.

Michael Evans: Thank you ever to Kyra. She did this, you know, totally volunteer and we were so happy to be able to do this with her would be awesome. If you could check out her patrons page and check out her website and show her some love, I’ll link it down to the description. The first links note that we have a lot of talking in between and she shares some incredible insights of her own.

Michael Evans: So it’s like a live workshop plus interview plus kind of like a writer therapy session, [00:02:00] but it’s kind of a beautiful mesh of things. Luckily in description, wherever you’re listening to this, I’ve timestamped all of the important things that you will want to go. So if you wanna skip to, when we have screenshots of her patron page and we’re reviewing it, you can skip to that.

Michael Evans: If you wanna skip to, when we’re talking about her email, you can skip to that. But I will say, I think you should listen to this whole thing. I know it’s long, hard to do one sitting tune in the car. It’s a really enlightening conversation and really inspiring. We’re gonna be starting off talking about Kyra’s goals for her career and her subscription.

Michael Evans: We’re then gonna be diving into what she offers in her subscription. Currently giving a little tier review, be fun. And then lastly, we’re gonna be talking all about how she promotes her subs. We’ll even be getting into talk about social media, a little bit of author, mental health, and really trying to improve her conversion rate.

Michael Evans: So let’s get started, how you can turn your readers into subscribers, a bang.[00:03:00]

Michael Evans: Before we officially get into the workshop, here’s an introduction to Kyra Fox. She’s been a published author for the last three years and has five novels out plus plenty of stories on serial fiction platforms like radish. She’s been on patron for the last three months and has seven patrons, AKA readers paying her monthly to describe to early access.

Michael Evans: And some other benefits that will get into, she also has a couple thousand readers on her mailing list. So we’re gonna be diving into how she can bring more onto Patreon, but also just in general, how we can help further her author career. So let’s get into it.

Emilia Rose: Thank you so much for joining us Kyra.

Emilia Rose: I’m really excited to, talk to you a little bit about subscriptions and help you out with you.

Kyra Fox: Yeah, it’s really great to be here and thank you so much for having me.

Michael Evans: We’re super excited for it. This is our first time doing an episode like this, and I guess really. Most important thing. Our goal here is to, to learn where you want to go in your author career, but also [00:04:00] as it pertains to subscriptions.

Michael Evans: And then we want to hear about what you think is holding you back from that. And hopefully we can all help you, not just us here, but if you’re listening, I hope you can also chip in and help a fellow subscriptions for authors community member. And maybe one day we can also help you out too, and do a similar thing.

Michael Evans: This might be a series. We’ll see, but to get it started, I am curious, Kyra, what has your journey been like as a writer, both as an indie author, but then also as it pertains to subscriptions up to this point.

Kyra Fox: So I’ve actually been thinking about this, earlier today, is that when I just started, had the sentence to, dive right into the end without thinking too much.

Kyra Fox: And that’s basically what I did when I started, I really wanted do, get up and I was writing it and then I soft and wrote from the go cause I, and then I just went and started. I went on [00:05:00] Instagram, Instagram and started this journey where I did like an on job training. That’s what we used to call it way back in one of the jobs that I did, it’s like training and I learned everything on the go.

Kyra Fox: And I think it was very standard. You know, I started in KU and, and did Instagram promotions and worked into bookboxes and good reads. And I tried to do everything and all the social platforms. And

Kyra Fox: eventually I realized that Kindle unlimited wasn’t the right place for me, that I really started a wide, and reach as much as, as much an audience as I could. And slowly I started because I come from a business background, I used to be a corporate lawyer. Then it took me, it didn’t take me too long to realize that I building a business office writing in publishing books.

Kyra Fox: And the more I thought about it as a business, the more I realized that in sustainable business has to have passive income and passive income [00:06:00] means taking the products that you already have and spreading the amount as much as you can to, to get as much revenue, if you can, off them and monetize them as much as possible.

Kyra Fox: And I actually started with radi. I went wide and then I started with radish. I got onto radish and I started publishing my books there and writing serial specifically for radish. And then after I started writing a zero for radish I started. Promoting it on my newsletter and talking to people about radish.

Kyra Fox: And I realize not everybody’s on radish and I want my books, even the ones that I write, just this serialized fiction reach as many people decided to, and the idea behind was to, and large reader based as possible access to my serialized fiction that I am not going to publish as an [00:07:00] ebook on retailing.

Kyra Fox: And that’s basically, that’s, that’s been my journey.

Emilia Rose: Yeah. I feel like it’s so hard not to like, get sucked into wanting to do a little bit of everything. Like, for me, that’s hard too, because everyone, like, you just see these success stories of people like being very successful on like different things.

Emilia Rose: You’re like, oh, like maybe I’ll be successful too. So I’m gonna just like jump over and do this too. And then like a week later, there’s something else. And you’re like, well, now I have to go do this. Like that didn’t work out. Let’s start with this. So yeah, at at least like what I found most important was just like, especially with subscriptions, it does start off slow, but like sticking to it really, really helps

Michael Evans: getting to subscriptions.

Michael Evans: How was that beginning journey on Patreon for you? Did you find success? How did you bring your readers there? How did that all go?

Kyra Fox: First, the first entry. [00:08:00] Patreon was, was pretty successful cuz I sent it out to my newsletter and immediately got five subscribers, which I felt amazing about. And that’s where it stopped.

Kyra Fox: So I wouldn’t say it was a success cause was all reader training hard. I’ve experienced it obviously when going from kind limited to wide reader, training is super hard. I’m also doing that now with my direct store, getting readers to shift their mindset. not just from the ebook retailer mindset, which in itself is very solid.

Kyra Fox: Just the Amazon mindset is very prevalent in readers and Amazon really, controls the markets for reason. They’re very good at their marketing. And I dunno anything against, I don’t have anything against Amazon, but isn’t like anti Amazon, Amazon shouldn’t have such a large market share. They did their homework that’s way they have such a large market share and, getting readers to get out of that mindset and think [00:09:00] about subscription for, for, for both instead of, of buying an ebook or going so also the subscription, by the way, very difficult.

Kyra Fox: And I found that aside from that really that went well., it has not been going great even though yesterday patron like a supporter on the $1 tier, but supporter, So I’m very patient., my blog is actually named not a sprint cause of that eternal India offers a marathon, not a sprint. and a big of that.

Kyra Fox: I said that every new that comes into, into field wanting to start, publishing’s a marathon sprint, everything education. but I have, I have to admit that that is really testing my patients cause it is extremely hard to, to get people to switch over to the subscription mindset. [00:10:00] And I think we’re gonna talk about what I think my pain points are a bit more down the road, right?

Michael Evans: Definitely, definitely. But that’s first of all, having five subscribers in a first day, that’s really good sign. Cause it probably means you have five super fans who will follow you anywhere. So that that’s pretty cool. I mean, that’s not like amazing. That is, something’s a big deal. I don’t think most author can say, I’m not confident I get to that myself and I think that’s really cool.

Michael Evans: However, what I’m curious about is before subscriptions, where was your income coming in from? And a kind of a question going off of that? Like the income splits I should say. Cause I know you went, why and then what is your goal? You mentioned that subscriptions is a good thing for you to do, to have a diversified base, to have passive income coming through that all makes sense.

Michael Evans: But for your life, what do you want your life to look like as an [00:11:00] author?

Kyra Fox: Think my answer are super boring. I’d like just to be a full author, I’d like to be able to have enough income that I can actually sit and concentrate on doing just that. Which isn’t entirely true because I do actually like, like, but to say, I like doing things around it, like community management thing, but I like, my life should be around books.

Kyra Fox: You know what I mean? Like you guys dream, it’s exactly the same idea. Like if I do something that isn’t writing and, and publishing a book, I’d like it to be a bookish endeavor. and basically being able to say that my office career is stable. That’s why I think that I really went this year. I knew this year was gonna be a bit of a du writing and publishing because of pregnancy childbirth, babies taking care of it.

Kyra Fox: It’s so. Time consuming and energy consuming and, [00:12:00] gray matter consuming my brains, not as sharp as it was of pregnancy. And I knew this was gonna be a very difficult year. I had, I still working as a teacher and we moved twice and 10 months. So this year is gonna be a do so this year I really concentrated on diversifying.

Michael Evans: That’s it we’re we want to hear that because that is what matters at the end of the day. We’re not just like doing subscriptions because like, it’s fun. Like, like I hope we can make everything fun, but the business of writing has to be about our lives. It’s about the people we love. It’s about doing what we love.

Michael Evans: And it’s really cool to hear your story and, and how that applies to you specifically. And I think, you know, when we think about subscriptions in that whole picture, what is your dream with subscriptions?

Kyra Fox: I think I just talked to Robin Crawford about this. Yesterday I had a Robin Crawford is the [00:13:00] founder of Eden books.

Kyra Fox: It’s a romance centered online retailer and she actually started Eden books. Pretty much with the same reason you guys were starting green. I just talked to her about this yesterday. It was really an amazing conversation. And we had a conversation because I commented something in the subscription group.

Kyra Fox: A question and they said, well, can we just sit and like talk about stuff. I really gonna get some Oler info about what I can do on patron as a bookstore. And we had an amazing conversation yesterday, and I really think that patron and hopefully not just, but ream and, and other subscription services, that means being so author centered so much doing.

Kyra Fox: I really want it to not even personally for me become a place where [00:14:00] big power houses, not necessarily like big five places like edenbooks and the HEA collective, and more organizing like that really give reclaim the, the power that patron has to promote and to supplement author income. And one of the things that I was talking about was rubbing yesterday is that as a bookstore, she can bring so much more to the table for subscribers than I can as an individual author.

Kyra Fox: And she decided that she does something, the HEA collective does that she showcases an author a month or show through the trope a month with a few chosen. That gives us an insane platform to collect newsletter subscribers, to find new dedicated readers. And I think patron both as individual, as an individual author and as a more organized collective let’s call it that can really [00:15:00] give Indies a place to reclaim sort of reclaim the way that they talk to readers.

Kyra Fox: Something that we can’t do to date with really big retailers. We have no connection with the readers through Amazon, unless they decide to sign up for a newsletter, or follow us on Instagram. Like it all depends on does the reader decides to follow up here and there once, once they join us on Patreon or, basically part reclaim our place of authors and connect to a readers a much more focused way, I’m not sure.

Michael Evans: Makes, makes sense, makes total sense. You know, it reminds me of something and I wanna bring up an example for everyone listening. There’s this program called Nebula that a group of education creators on YouTube run. And it’s basically like the HEA collective, but it’s been around for three years.

Michael Evans: It’s, you know, we’re just experimenting in the author issue with this now, but this is a collective video creators who have been doing. And [00:16:00] they did it for basically the same reasons you’re sharing. They wanted a more direct connection to their audience. They figured like subscription revenue can supplement our income, but why have one pay to subscribe to every single creator?

Michael Evans: When we know there’s a group of people who care about us as a collective and we can, there’s no, not a huge pressure on all of us to provide so much. And we could just create something that so many people wanna be a part of. So Nebula, is, was actually created by a talent management agency at the creators we’re all signed onto and it’s done very well.

Michael Evans: And it’s a similar model that I think you’re talking about. And it’s something that authors I think are just kind of getting around to, which is interesting. So do you think you would wanna join a collective? Is that what you’re saying?

Kyra Fox: I think I kind of volunteered to join Robin collective. She starts it.

Kyra Fox: , but yeah, so there are very new author they’re not talking about, often [00:17:00] that built their, their fan base in, in subscription to go to subscription, to begin with. Cause I think people who did that super clever and it’s, again, it’s an entire process that, I’m not sure I’m hundred, hundred percent in the place where I want to build from scratch a subscription and.

Kyra Fox: I’ve, I’m already almost, what are we now? 2022. I’m over three years into my author career. I’ve done work in publishing and signing my fan base and signing my readers. And, as much as I’d like to say, let’s go and he makes Adrian one of my biggest revenues and do something completely new and innovative that will bring in people that would never read me otherwise.

Kyra Fox: And I don’t have the, the attention for that right now. Dunno, you guys, you see that? [00:18:00] That’s my writing schedule through 25. Okay. So, and some of those, yeah. Other than anology, some of those are theories that I already have this first book out I need to finish. And some of those that I really wanna start, and one of those is, is my serialized fiction, which goes on radish general Patriot.

Kyra Fox: So I really opened mine for the sake of supplementing radish. Now I put off other stuff there as well, but the idea was to use Paton, to tap into my existing fan base. I can’t, I’m not in a place I’m really not in a place where I can start from scratch. And I kinda like the way that I work with my books and my novels and it’s it’s a confusing place to be.

Kyra Fox: Cause I can see how, how great this, this, the subscription works for some people when they decide to really [00:19:00] go for it. But it’s a question to be asked. Isn’t it like with direction you take?

Emilia Rose: Yeah. I think one big misconception around subscriptions is like people who are successful start from scratch, like you’ve mentioned, but I feel like right now, the way subscriptions are set up and the platforms that are available, that people are on, there’s no discovery on those platforms.

Emilia Rose: So you do have to bring in readers from your other platforms and you need to bring in readers who are your super fans and like those five readers who joined your first day, that is amazing. Like my first subscriber ever was my husband and he didn’t even tell me until like, I think I found out like a couple months ago and he was like, yeah, it was your first subscriber.

Emilia Rose: I was like, what are you talking about? So yeah, it it’s really like. You bringing in those readers from other areas, who want to support you monthly [00:20:00] and can support you monthly. but going off of that, like how, how do you like serial fiction compared to like, fiction that you publish on Amazon? And do you, I think you mentioned, do you only publish your serial fiction on radish?

Emilia Rose: Do you ever like make it into like a book or ebook and sell it on like wide retailers at

Kyra Fox: all?

Kyra Fox: All? So I was only started, I just finished the first season of my serialized fiction series

Kyra Fox: that, but I’ll start with the first question that I’m loving serial fiction. It might be because I’m allowing myself because it’s radish and romance so much better than I’m really allowing myself to delve deep into the kinky size of romance that with my published, my retailers, I’m not gonna say I’m, I’m venting into the PG 13, nowhere close, but I tend to stay [00:21:00] a bit more reserved.

Kyra Fox: I really I’m really letting loose, and I’m also liking the serialized fiction

Kyra Fox: because I like the idea. I don’t think I’ve ever written that way, which, which is weird. Cause you’re supposed to write that way. But when you write a whole novel, it develops much more differently than serialized fiction and serialized fiction. It says really you think every single episode that you write as an episode, I think it would’ve been on TV.

Kyra Fox: Would’ve would’ve been a good episode that you would’ve continued watching the show afterwards and you write a novel. Don’t write like that because people just read the novel. It’s okay. If you have a lower chapter, it’s okay. If you have a, a chapter that’s, emotion, more emotion, more conversations, like that’s a bit slower inside theme of an entire novel.

Kyra Fox: It works. It doesn’t work that way, your life. And they love that, that you always have like the high and serialized fiction. Something about that was very appealing to me as the writer. And, [00:22:00] and it’s noting like the, the, even though I recently discover the better finish story, no matter what, like don’t do serial fiction just because it serial without finishing the entire story first.

Kyra Fox: So don’t start opening it up. lesson learned the hard way. But as for publishing, it doesn’t enable that is, very down the road plan. It’s also shorter. It’s about 45,000 words. My novels are really usually between 70 to thousand words and because I want to keep it more. Exclusive early act sort of idea.

Kyra Fox: Then my plan was to basically, publish them in, in, binds of three, like as a collection, every three stories that I finished writing, then publish it as a collection, as an ebook. The only exception is that on, I do have a tier that they get each story that I finish as an Eagle. So that’s like exclusively for [00:23:00] Patreon right now.

Emilia Rose: I actually really love serial fiction for the same exact reason. I just love how it’s just like, it’s very short and you there’s so much drama in that. Like each chapter is very dramatic compared to like, when you’re reading, like some like traditional books we’ll call them. the chapters are sometimes more drawn out.

Emilia Rose: And my like my mind, I’m like, no, I need the drama right now. but that’s really interesting, that you have a separate tier for your early access as well as as well as the books

Kyra Fox: once they’re finished.

Michael Evans: So I think this brings us talking about tiers. We should probably talk about on your Patreon page for your subscription, how current are you enticing readers to subscribe and how have you mentioned and let readers know that that’s a thing?

Kyra Fox: so I admit, [00:24:00] I not been great with the promotion of mine, even though I do mention it. I want to say very frequently, but, but I do mention it at least once every other week in my newsletter with a teaser from my, my cereal and for my cereal usually saying that, you know, they get early access.

Kyra Fox: I have a tier there that also gets both of chapters instead of every week, a new like episode. I I, honestly think I have a very big issue with making tears. I they’re a bit jumbled and a bit over the top or under underwhelming or overwhelming. I haven’t really figured out how to, to optimize them in a way that that really represents what I wanna give in them to my, to my benefactors.

Kyra Fox: And, and I think that that’s my main pain [00:25:00] point really with, with Patreon is that. I haven’t figured it out, like how, how to entice the non a lot of people come in and go like, oh yeah, $1. Okay. I’ll support. And also, I really like for $1, somebody that I really wanna read, then I’ll support them for the five.

Kyra Fox: But those will, will never be, those will be few and far apart. Yeah. Few and far apart. and I haven’t figured out how I to non fund yet. So, and IED, more marketing myself. I had this conversation a lot and I think a lot of offers feel this way, that self marketing does not come naturally and it does not come easily.

Kyra Fox: And especially in a place like subscription, cause it’s much easier to come and say, Hey buy my book for 2 99 1 time or buy my notes, my book for 4 99, 1 time than this to say, Hey, come and give me 5, 10, 15 every month. so yeah, that’s where I am with promoting my Patreon page, [00:26:00] basically between me and trying to, I’m really not succeeding to this is so embarassing

Emilia Rose: Is there a way we can pull up your tiers right now so we can see what they currently are and what you’re offering?

Kyra Fox: Basically my $1 tier is my basic tier and what I give here is once a week, episode of my serialized fiction release, and then people can support for $1 and then wait until the episode releases and they get the exclusive polls and Q as and stuff like that.

Kyra Fox: What I’m planning to do with this is once I finish posting all the, all the episodes that I have, which should be in the next couple of weeks, then I’m going to shut the tier down and do a $1 tier that’s support. Only. Now the $2 tier is interesting. it’s, not really in my tier. what we’re doing is a group of us steam offers got together and we’re trying this promotional thing where once a week, we go live on a secret, [00:27:00] Facebook page.

Kyra Fox: Emilia’s on that page. I invited her, I didn’t invite you my phone. I need to invite you shame on me. and we have a list of prompts and we randomly choose 10 prompts. And then we spin a wheel and whatever prompt comes out, that’s every Saturday. And then whatever prompt comes out, we, post, one shot of it, give me one shot of it on Wednesday.

Kyra Fox: And at the end, we have a list of all participating authors, which links to their, to their Patreon pages. And we try to sort of do a Patreon on half every week with, with the prompt. It’s been working for some working less for others, but we only did once. We, we did two, I didn’t post mine yet this week, but we only did two so far and people are starting to see a little movement in the $2 tier from that sort of a promotional, promotional attempt.

Kyra Fox: We’ll keep you posted on that in the actual group. We should, we need to start posting about that. so after my $1 tier, which is called slow burn, I have the simmering heat, which $5 a month. And here they get immediate and early access to all the [00:28:00] finalized episodes. which means that they don’t have to wait until they, get published either once a week on the $1 tier or on, radish, which also, I don’t publish all of it at once.

Kyra Fox: I publish it once, twice a week. So here they just get a bulk of four or five episodes at the same time. And when a story is done, they get an exclusive digital download of the full story, which is the only place that you can get that. After that I have the feel the fire, which is a $12 tier, which gets everything from the previous tier and early release of all published styles, which means everything that goes on retailers, they get also an early release and they sort of get as a bonus.

Kyra Fox: They get my, my box set of, of my first which is a three book series. The $20 per month, you get all of the above. And you get an exclusive mug, which is a patron merged and exclusive access to edited [00:29:00] chapters. Then there’s the $45 a month. And the next two tiers are things that Sean and Mia Sean Channowitz with and Mia Harlan did and was very successful for them.

Kyra Fox: I’ve yet to see success from these, that every six consecutive months you get, annotated annotated book from a and annotated paper and some merch I like in merch, and which is are the hundred dollars per month is personalized scenes that anybody who is a full month on this tier can get any theme of any of my characters that they want in any situation that they want.

Kyra Fox: Cause they tell me I write it, which is also, one of Sean’s ideas. And she does amazingly. That was here.

Emilia Rose: First of all, I love your tears. I love that you’re doing early access to stuff, [00:30:00] especially and offering merch. one of my suggestions right now, just seeing all of your tier and you explaining them to me, some of the tier feel like.

Emilia Rose: They’re the same thing. Like for me, it might be like, it’s not clear, like super, super clear what you’re getting in each tier compared to like the previous tier or the tier after. but before I forget, this is a hundred dollars tier, I really love it. I was actually doing something similar in my, I think it was $10 tier, which is kind of crazy a while ago.

Emilia Rose: And I was like, if you sign up for my $10 tier, I’ll write a short story of whatever you want. so that could possibly be maybe a way to get more people to join this a hundred dollars tier is to like, instead of limiting it to like the characters that you already have in your stories, like you can ask like, Hey, if you have like a situation that you definitely want me to write about, or a [00:31:00] couple characters that you’ve been thinking about for a while and you want like a steamy scene of them, or like a scene that’s like cute or whatever, I will write it.

Emilia Rose: And then you’ll retain like full copyright and stuff of it because it’s your work. and like, you don’t have to ever publish it anywhere else outside of you giving it to them. but that could lead to different ideas that you might have for. For books that you wanna write in the future? I don’t know.

Emilia Rose: Like if they want to suggest a couple of your characters, like they could do that too. Or if they want like a completely new story they could ask for one, I don’t know if you would be ever be like, interested in that. That’s just like my, what I’ve seen in the past work

Michael Evans: for me on the point of the, I guess, starting in like a reverse order with the a hundred dollars tier, I think it’s really cool that you’re, you’re doing that and I can see why it’s worked for other authors.

Michael Evans: [00:32:00] I will concur with everything Emilia said, but add that I think a hundred dollars is too cheap. This is why if someone’s paying a hundred dollars for this, like they’ve got money to spare, right? You’re not, you know, I hope someone’s spending their last a hundred dollars in their bank account on this.

Michael Evans: And this very much feels like they’re commissioning work for you. And to be at a rate of like $50 an hour for commissioned work, you know, from being a corporate lawyer, like that’s like very low, like no lawyer works that price. Now we can say, oh, well, writers are, lawyers are so much better than us, but I mean, lawyers are paid a lot more usually, but I think that this price should be a lot higher to pay you for what your time’s worth.

Michael Evans: Because if you think about the value of the intellectual property you create in a novel, you said your novel. Or 80,000 words. So this would mean that if I gave you 40 of these, [00:33:00] you would have a novel worth of these to write. And you’d only be getting paid $4,000 for that novel that does not work out economically to me as being sustainable over the long run, because you want the people on this tier.

Michael Evans: Like I understand like a lot of people listening, my, I mean, how, I don’t really make much profit off my novels to be clear, but like, I think my novel’s worth more than $4,000. That IP is worth more than that. so I would maybe think about pricing that you don’t have to literally do a calculator and think about, well, I want my novel, you know, I think my novel is like really worth more like $50,000 in IP.

Michael Evans: Like if I wanna try and write two books a year and make six figures, therefore this is really how much 2000 words is worth. You don’t have to go that crazy with it. But a hundred dollars really seems quite cheap to me.

Emilia Rose: I’m kind of like opposite of you, Michael. I do, I do think a hundred dollars if you’re commissioning something and it’s exclusive for that person, that’s virtue cheap.

Emilia Rose: But if you say, for the a hundred dollars a month, I’ll write a [00:34:00] 2000 word story, but I get to share it with everybody else. Like I get to share it with all my other Patreon supporters and I can potentially make that into a longer book. I think that’s worth it because like they’re giving you like an idea.

Emilia Rose: Or suggesting idea to write about you’re, you’re taking that idea. You’re making it your own and you get to share it with all these other people. for me that would be worth it for a hundred dollars. I know like some people have given me ideas for one shots and they’re not like, like I’m not copying the idea, like to, to the tea.

Emilia Rose: I’m like giving it my giving, breathing it life, I guess through my own creativity. and I eventually make those short little, one shots into longer books, which I sell. And I retain the entire copyright because like, the idea might have been suggested by somebody, but like it, I could have found it like anywhere.

Emilia Rose: Like I could have found inspiration anywhere. It’s just one of my [00:35:00] supporters was like, you should write about this. You should write like a bad boy romance. And so I wrote a bad boy romance. but any like any reader who comes for free, like you might have somebody in your Facebook group be like, Hey, you should write like a, a Wolf shift to romance.

Emilia Rose: It’s basically like the same thing sort of, if

Emilia Rose: that makes sense.

Michael Evans: I agree completely with that. If, if you’re releasing it to the public, then disregard my advice. But I do note that it says at the bottom note, I will retain full copyright, which is true of these scenes. But will not publish them in the form they were sent to you anywhere else.

Michael Evans: So since I was kind of taking that as what your current tier is, seeming like something exclusive to the individual you know, something to think about all around. I totally agree with Emilia other things that people can think about. and you could think it as well, Kyra is naming a character after someone in a book that’s pretty cool being in the acknowledgements.

Michael Evans: These are all like little things that are, are not, don’t seem little they’re big, but they take very little time. [00:36:00] And you were also speaking earlier about signings. And when we think about like high priced tiers you know, you could really think about what would a virtual signing look like if I like talk with this person for 30 minutes on zoom, about my story, that could be like a really intimate experience that you do once a month with people signed up and it’s tier, you know, another thing could be literally, this sounds crazy, but I I’ve seen someone do this on Patreon where if you pay like a thousand dollars, it’s like, I will like hand over.

Michael Evans: It might even be more than that. Like I will hand over your book anywhere in the continental us, like they’ll fly to them. So I know for you being international would have to be much more than a thousand to make it worthwhile, but you could think about wild things like that. Or like, if you send me like whatever, $2,000, I’ll do a book signing in your city kind of deal.

Michael Evans: Like you were talking about wanting to be able to pay, to do conventions and things like that. And, and look, let’s be real. Not many people can afford. And that might not happen too often, but once a [00:37:00] year, even once over the course of a five year career, if someone signing up could be cool. But before I get too caught up in big ideas, all of thinking about, you know, the 0.1% of your readers that will ever consider these things because of financial reasons, right?

Michael Evans: I wanna talk about the other tiers and really where I think maybe the problems are, but how you can make it better. So I personally don’t see a huge difference between your one and $5 tier from a value add standpoint. So for me as a reader, if I can’t tell that very easily, it’s not super obvious. I’m going to sign up for the $1 tier and that you’re missing out on potentially like a good bit of money there.

Michael Evans: So if I was you, I would think about bundling a lot of the benefits that you put, the $1 tier into the $5 tier, you know, $1 as well to anyone who’s who’s listening. I think it’s, it’s, it’s great to [00:38:00] like have a payment that’s really accessible, but an issue that I’m sure you’ve run into, and this is gonna be true on every platform, no matter how you accept payment, online credit card companies and banks take like 20 cents, 30 cents out of each transaction that you make.

Michael Evans: So Patreon, I think purposely loses money on the $1 donations. But still takes a higher fee than they would on a $3 donation. And if you use other platforms, they basically like Patreon tried to make it work for people with this. But yeah, $1 donations aren’t super economical because you’re not gonna be capturing as much of the value of that as you would from a $3 tier, a higher proportion of that will go to the banks.

Michael Evans: So that’s just one thing it’s pretty unavoidable. It’s sad that the internet works that way, but that’s how it is. I would also think about, you know, you could still have a $1 tier, but I think you’re writing like on a, on a per basis of like, [00:39:00] what is it worth? I think that you might wanna set kind of that pricing signal a bit higher because these are your super fans already.

Michael Evans: So that that’s one thing. I think you’re 10, $25 tier. You had a lot of tears in there. I think that’s all good stuff. However, I worry that there’s a lot in there that can be confusing to patrons and a bit overwhelming, both new ones. And for you, because you’re still at the beginning of building your, your subscribership.

Michael Evans: I think over time, you’ll be able to like upsell people once they’ve been with you into different tiers and they’ve really loved the community, but I think starting simple is, is better. And. For you, it might be less overwhelming to then think about like, what if I just focus on these two tiers and you already have, I love the, the one [00:40:00] shots that you’re doing with the collaboration, romance authors.

Michael Evans: I think that’s wonderful. And then maybe you devote your efforts to just one other tier and the rest is, is just not like you can have it live, but for other authors who are listening as well, because we wanna help everyone here, you know, Kyra and a learning experience for us all, I would not recommend setting up seven tier day one.

Michael Evans: That’s just me personally. I mean, they might have a completely different device. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. But to me that feels overwhelming. I think focusing on small little things, okay. I’m just doing early access. This is all we’re doing and answer $5 and you get early access to everything I write you know, that very simple to communicate, but also very easy to see the value in, I think is what we’ll convert.

Michael Evans: Yeah.

Emilia Rose: going off that, I’m going to talk a lot about like my experience cuz it’s sort of similar. So when I started, I actually started Aon for my other Penn name. and I had a $1 tier [00:41:00] and I quickly, I did shut that Patreon down because it wasn’t profitable for me anymore because like $1 isn’t profitable.

Emilia Rose: And as Michael was saying, like you’re super fans are going like, like as authors, we want to. We think we should price things as low as possible, because like, that’s what like was taught to us. Like, we feel like nobody’s gonna pay for our work. Like that’s how, when I started, I was like, nobody’s going to pay even a dollar for my writing, but people do, like people pay like three, five, $10 now for my writing to receive like monthly access for it.

Emilia Rose: And people who are going to support you monthly are going to be okay with that. personally on my Patreon now I have a three, five and $10 tier and my most popular tiers are the $3 and the $10. I do think you should start at a higher tier than $1. just because like that, like Michael [00:42:00] said, it shows your super fans that your writing is worth more than a dollar.

Emilia Rose: And like those people who are going to support you monthly,

Emilia Rose: they could go on Amazon and read any like KU book for free. But like these people decided to like come to you and join your subscription because they wanna see your writing. and they’re, they’ll more likely be okay with paying a little bit more than just a dollar.

Emilia Rose: Especially if like you explain, they don’t even have to explain anything. but yeah. I know like personally, my. Content people are join the most on tier three and or my $3 tier and my $10 tier compared to my $5 tier, just because they like what’s in my $10 tier a lot more than my $5 tier. and I think a lot of that is also like what your readers are looking for.

Emilia Rose: Like, are they looking for like that specific merch you might have in, in one of your tiers, [00:43:00] are they looking for like exclusive contents or early access? And it’s really just depending on what you train your readers to look for, as well as what they’re like naturally looking for.

Michael Evans: One and one piece of advice I’d throw in there as well.

Michael Evans: When just starting out, you don’t have to try and guess about what your readers want, because I think we like to, you were mentioning that there’ll be collectives who can do really well in subscriptions, and it’s hard to compete with them. I agree and disagree. So if you’re thinking about directly funneling people in a subscription, they’re coming to a landing page, they don’t know much about what’s going on, but they are readers.

Michael Evans: So they might be interested. Yes. If you are a singular author you’re going and they don’t have an existing relationship with you, it’s going harder for them to really have that. Is it worthwhile compared to. Someone who’s like, oh, we have 20 books bundled into this subscription. Right. That seems like, [00:44:00] whoa, like, let me sign up to that.

Michael Evans: But I will say when it comes to bookstores on Patreon, there’s a lot of bookstores that don’t offer. Like, they’re not, they’re actual physical bookstores. They’re not offering like physical books. They’re not offering eBooks. It’s just like, come support me. And there’s a lot of reading creators. Like people who have like podcasts that talk about books, they have book clubs, but like they didn’t write the books who are on Patreon and who are very successful.

Michael Evans: And they’re people who even want to highlight in this podcast. But I mention them as anecdotes. The fact they exist just to say that they’ve built an existing relationship, their audience that exists mostly off Patreon and Paton is a place where they come to support them. So I think both are opportunities as an author.

Michael Evans: And I think for you, you were talking about, I don’t wanna like build a subscription business and I think that’s valid subscriptions are a piece of your business and thinking about the rest of the business, I am really curious about [00:45:00] that because how are you currently bringing

Kyra Fox: in readers? I shamefully admit that I’ve started dabbling with TikTok.

Kyra Fox: Uh okay. I’m not entirely proud of that. I, a big fan of TikTok. it’s like the good readers of social media. But I think in the past year, the main, because I haven’t published since January. Like my last book came out in January of this year and I don’t think I’m gonna have, I don’t think I’m gonna finish the second book by the end of this year.

Kyra Fox: Sadly, the characters have been pains in my behind in that sense. And I know you guys, I know you guys relate, we all have those kinda characters. then the main thing I’ve been doing is really working on my network. This year I really work on growing, my cross promoting likes and prosper, promoting newsletters and due, you know, [00:46:00] duet and stuff and collaborations on Instagram and thing that we’re doing on, on, Patreon with Patreon hop is, is it’s something that it, it’s not so much that I think that this is going to explode my Patreon and being hundreds of, of new readers.

Kyra Fox: It’s, it’s just that exposure where I think, I think I talk I talked, I said this at Michael, when we, we spoke before that one of the, the, things that I like most when it comes to the indie author world is a rising tide lifts, all, both mm-hmm . Yeah. So I think, I think that that’s, that’s been my, my, my go to, to business plans that arising tide lists all boats that I’ve really been working on that on, on really getting myself out there in terms of, of, of networking with other authors that, that we could, we could pull our readers together and, and sort [00:47:00] of pollinate each other.

Kyra Fox: I love that that really also works best in the end. And I’ve gotten to do some really, really cool stuff like last year, my, last year for my birthday giveaway every year, my birthday to like a, sort of, I do a giveaway. so last year for my birthday giveaway, I got Melissa Foster and, and really big names.

Kyra Fox: And I did a, for my releasing January, I did a romantic suspense bookbook giveaway and had Tia we, and, NOTAM alone, like, and this networking thing, it really worked and I’m not a big name. And I speak to people that I idolize as people that authors, that got me on the path to being an author, people that all of a sudden I’m having conversations with on, on Instagram and, and emailing with like me Lynn, Kelly, and.

Kyra Fox: Annika Martin then that, that I go to their books when I need inspiration. Those are the people that got me writing and I have a relationship with them. And if I want to, I can send a message. [00:48:00] I feel comfortable sending them message saying, Hey, I have a new release. Could you put it in your newsletter? Or do you wanna be part of my birthday giveaway?

Kyra Fox: And they’ve been ANCA was part of my birthday giveaway last year as well. And it it’s just, I really think that this year I’ve, I’ve, I’ve really gone down that route much more than the paid newsletters and even my own newsletter as a way of expanding my reader base and reaching more people, and it’s slow, it’s much slower than putting 120 bucks on, written word media, but it works.

Kyra Fox: It really does. I think, for, for getting your more ideal reader than, than anything else, I

Kyra Fox: I

Emilia Rose: feel like that fosters community a lot more too, because like they readers are like, wow, like this, my, my, my author that I follow, like is supporting this other author. And like, her books must be good. Like, let me go read them.

Emilia Rose: Like, [00:49:00]

Kyra Fox: yeah. It, which also is this it’s one of the things like, you know, when, when Annika Martin or Marilyn Kelly or Melissa Foster name drops, like, I think I know I’m, it’s not the pinnacle, but I kinda feel like I’ve hit the pinnacle.

Michael Evans: I wanna give, the other perspective, which is authors who have trouble even thinking about approaching another author, nevermind a bestselling author.

Michael Evans: And for me, because for the longest time I was that author, that is a struggle. I feel deeply. So when I was 15, I was like publishing and I felt just so young and like, no one will ever talk to me. I’m just like some random kid. So I knew like no writers and I didn’t make an effort at it cuz I felt so insecure.

Michael Evans: And what I ended up doing was paying for these promot services because I had a job and I was like, literally like would be like anything to like sell [00:50:00] books, but not talking to authors is what I would rather do. Right. Not talking to people, but put my book in that newsletter, whatever that seemed so much easier, but it wasn’t a long term strategy for me.

Michael Evans: It was something that I felt like I was on this treadmill of having to constantly promote myself. And it feels much better to build relationships than promote myself. So I started getting into it. But admittedly, I guess I’m here host this podcast. I’m actually pretty outgoing. So I’m not a perfect fit as like an author who might be shy.

Michael Evans: I’m not shy. I just was insecure for a long time. So if you’re insecure, I’m speaking to you now. Try and realize that everyone is just as scared. Everyone thinks they’re writing is pretty terrible. Some days people who are successful question, why they have readers, people who don’t have a lot of readers like me question why we don’t have readers.

Michael Evans: We all do it sometimes. But what I’m curious with for you, Kyra [00:51:00] is speaking to the shy people. Speaking’s the people who, it doesn’t matter. Put your insecurities aside, talking to people, meeting authors is out of the comfort zone. What would be your advice to that person?

Kyra Fox: So I didn’t get here because I’m Uber secure.

Kyra Fox: I’m not every time I sent out an email to one of the big names or, or approached a big name.

Kyra Fox: I’d, I’d get an anxiety attack. Like I, yeah, legit get an anxiety just to look at my screen and go, like, I cannot send this email says, Hey, I’m a big fan of your work. I’d really love the collaborate with you. Cuz I think I writing styles or compatible and you’re great inspiration to me and nothing about that.

Kyra Fox: Email is, you know, bad. If I’d get an email like that, I’d be exceptionally accepted. and I get a panic attack and then, and this is gonna be very random. But if any of you have seen the movie [00:52:00] butter there’s a theme there where the little girl wants to. Sign up for a competition and she’s sitting in the car and she’s sort of frozen and terror from going and signing into competition, which is, she’s never done it before.

Kyra Fox: And she has like a natural NAS for this thing book going on it’s sculpting and butter. That’s what the movies called butter. And she has like this natural NA for it, but she’s super terrified cuz she’s never done it. And she’s, sitting in the car with her foster dad and she can’t move. She can’t get out of the car and he goes, and he goes, you know, when I face something that really scares me, I always like ask myself, what’s the worst that can happen.

Kyra Fox: And once I start running scenarios in my head of what’s the worst that happen, I realize that the worst case scenario isn’t really that bad. What’s the worst that can happen. They’ll ignore you. They’ll say no. Okay. So they ignored you and say no said no. And I think the, what if is always worth. And so for all the shy people and all the people are feeling insecure about [00:53:00] approaching bigger name authors or reaching out.

Kyra Fox: So the three things you need to remember is one, if it were you on the other side, rather than you being the fan writing, you’d be super excited to get this email. And these people are exactly the same as you only they’ve managed to sell more books because they’ve been in it longer or they started in tra so it was easier for them when they got into indie publishing.

Kyra Fox: So they already had an established fan base or. I don’t know for whatever reason they’re exactly like you only, they’ve managed to find a place where they have a title and getting feedback that you like their books and they inspire you is never a bad thing. Think about how you’d feel on the other side and realize that it would make them happy as well.

Kyra Fox: Second, always think what’s the worst that happen. The worst thing that can happen is that they ignore you or they say no, and it’s really not that bad if they do either of those, your world won’t come crashing down if they do either of [00:54:00] those. and third is that the, what if is always the worst? Cause what if they would’ve said yeah.

Kyra Fox: And you missed out on that opportunity. Yeah.

Michael Evans: Yeah. That’s, that’s, that’s really, that’s good advice there. I will share, a story that I have from my own experience of approaching someone. That was, that was quite of an idol to me. Actually, I did this in two instances and it worked both times. we all know Mark Dawson, or probably probably if you don’t, he runs, this course company and podcast all under the brand sell publishing formula.

Michael Evans: And there’s lots of Grifters and interesting people in this community, but he’s not one of them. He’s completely fantastic. And I couldn’t voucher him more. So I went to 20 books, 50 K in Vegas, which I also, can vouch for those people. It’s a great community. And The big, big one, somewhat overwhelming.

Michael Evans: So you might find, find you like your mini tribe there, but the big tribe of information’s [00:55:00] all there. And I went to the conference 2019 and I remember thinking, okay, like I haven’t ever really like, learned about advertising my books. I really wanna do it. It’s course kind of expensive. I did kind of just spend the money I had coming to this conference, but I wanna learn from him.

Michael Evans: So what if I asked him for an internship? So I just went on stage right after his keynote. I introduced myself and I asked for an internship and it worked. I mean, that was basically all that happened and it worked and that like was transformed for me in my author career. I mean, my, my income went from like, oh, hI make $30 maybe a month to, you know, six months later I was able to hit like 2000 month, which I was really happy with.

Michael Evans: Didn’t stay that’s other story. But regardless it was great. Happened another time for me, because I started to realize that a lot of what you have to do when reaching out to people who are like, quote, unquote bigger than you is that they’re [00:56:00] busy lot on their plates and they might have other people reaching out to them too.

Michael Evans: I guess like Mark Dawson probably has a lot of authors who wanna talk to him. not every author’s like that. Mind you, you might be the only author that’s ever contacted them saying, I love your work was inspired. And I wrote this book and went, you might for a lot of authors. That’s true. So don’t discount that.

Michael Evans: I was reaching out to this YouTuber, specifically, his name’s Eric, and he grew from zero to a million subscribers in a year. He was like, he’s quite famous. Now he’s almost 10 million. So he’s very, he’s a big, big YouTuber. And I reached out to him, not over email, but by kayaking to an island that he was having his million subscribers celebration on.

Michael Evans: I found him, I stalked him. I kayaked the island. I show up with a cake and I went and crashed his live stream that he was doing with subscribers. And I asked him for an internship. It was weird. It was very weird, but I proved to him that I had, like, I wanted to work for him and I was gonna like, [00:57:00] make the thing happen.

Michael Evans: So that’s crazy, please. Don’t kayak to pilots, but there is a world in which you can do things like Kyra has been doing, setting up these group promotions, right? Setting up abilities, where authors, they can reach new readers. They can provide something awesome to their fan base, but they’re not having to do the work for it.

Michael Evans: You’re you’re getting in there. You’re going into book funnel. You’re downloading the files. You’re setting up the email. It’s a little bit of grunt work, but you’re talking to your idol and that’s kind of the thing where it can work like that. It’s a, it’s a give and a take and they will be more than happy to impart their information and, and wisdom.

Michael Evans: And maybe even their readers upon you.

Kyra Fox: Yep. I think. I think again, the best advice that anybody would ever give you about, about reaching out to your idols is, is if you wanna work with them, make sure that that you’re, you’re compatible like in genres [00:58:00] and writing style. I have a lot of idols that, you know, I could never reach out into a collaboration with Julia Quinn.

Kyra Fox: I love her book, but there’s no, no meetings point, even her books in mind. So as much as I love her, I wouldn’t reach out to her. but people that are, are compatible with you, they’re always, always, no, not always, always, but as far so far as I’ve encountered them, they’re at least always very kind and very helpful, even if they don’t jump on, on shift with you and say, you know, I’m sorry, and this has happened to me.

Kyra Fox: I have a lot of my play right now. I have the release in a couple of weeks. I can’t really, even if I’m not doing any work, my, my mind, I can’t really be in the mind space to even think about adding anything else, even if I’m not doing any work and this has happened. And it’s legitimate. I do that a lot too, that I say that I can’t, I can’t handle even fing all the work.

Kyra Fox: I can’t handle another thing on my list right now, even if it’s just sending a link. but they’ve always been very kind and it always [00:59:00] establishes that, you know, that that first connection

Michael Evans: can always lead to other

Kyra Fox: things that are bigger and, and. Networking is really TAing to everyone. Like it’s really something that you learn the hard way as a, as a low key introvert, that networking is so important.

Emilia Rose: That’s me.

Kyra Fox: 100%.

Michael Evans: how has networking impacted your readership? Like you don’t need to give exact numbers. You’re not couple with it, but like, what were you doing before you decided to go out and network? How was that working? What made you shift doing this? Or did you do this from day one? What else have you tried?

Michael Evans: Tell us what what’s worked for you.

Kyra Fox: So I didn’t quite start networking. Well, I guess I did in a way. but I sort of stumbled into this big networking scene. and I just started out Instagram was my main platform I really had. [01:00:00] Oh, I I, barely started a newsletter. the only person from the book world that I was talking to was my, my editor and, and I had this Instagram, which looked dreadful and I was slowly getting subscribers and I don’t remember who I was talking to, but back then three years ago, before Instagram decided to, come down hard on us.

Kyra Fox: We had what was called, romance romance. On the contrary to follow frame, we never required follow followed. We never gave out anything. But what happened was that, and, and I jumped on maybe the second time that they did the loop as a young author. there were maybe 80 authors doing this and the loop that each author that participated had like we had like prompts or this or that, or complete this, or auto complete, or like a mini game, and then a list of all the participating authors.

Kyra Fox: And then they could jump [01:01:00] and play the mini game with all the authors. And it was never like, you know, follow me or follow the other authors and get something. And it was never like a follow training, never required any. So I was just like a fun game that would, that really got us organic followed on Instagram.

Kyra Fox: We never, I never lost people that followed me because they never were never there for anything aside from the fun and interest of the book. And from that one or two times that I joined at the beginning, I somehow ended up becoming a moderator. I like went into a week. You called it the, the brain loop, like the six piece hole that moderated the entire thing.

Kyra Fox: And I gained access to somewhere around 300 romance authors and books to romance books to grammars because I moderated it. And until today I have like the, the. And we ran that and we got to the point from around 50 authors from, with 20 authors, the first time 50 authors, when I joined the second time 80 authors, then we ended up having about 300 people [01:02:00] doing this loop with wow, just fun.

Kyra Fox: And I, every time we did the loop, we, I think I jumped from 500 followers to 2000 followers in about three weeks through the, it was, cause it kept going, it was so much fun. And really for the fun they realized we were just doing it really for engagement and to them and had such great connection with them.

Kyra Fox: And then Instagram time down and they suspended all the moderators accounts. I was suspended from Instagram for like two weeks tilled my engagement. I had to start from zero. It was well, not, not from scratch. Obviously I still had all my followers and they were very understanding, but climbing back to those numbers was very difficult, but that’s basically how I started realizing the power of networking.

Kyra Fox: And I totally stumbled into that. Like I just started talking to people and it was, they’re like, ah, you’re so funny. You’re so fun. And yeah, I fell on be a moderator. You look like a sun person, a mod with us. And I was like, okay, cool.

Michael Evans: So you’ve done a great job [01:03:00] building your author network and that’s helped funnel readers into your stories, but.

Michael Evans: Thinking about subscriptions as like your inner superfan network and that subscription being the home for it. How have you funneled people into that? And if you’re comfortable, it would be great to maybe see how you’ve done that examples of it. And we can give our feedback.

Kyra Fox: I always, I could show you I can show you the email I sent out when I just started teaching ion.

Kyra Fox: Yeah. I gladly show you that, the one that got me, the five subscribers and I’ve been sort of posting every time I update the serial story. I update it on Instagram. But I admit that I have not utilized the car of Instagram Patreon so much because honestly, and I think a lot of people feel, I don’t feel like what I’m offering marketable.[01:04:00]

Kyra Fox: I don’t know why. Cause I know it is. It’s not that I’m marketing on anything that I’m not marketing, otherwise on radish for my books. It’s pretty much the same deal, which for some odd reason, anything goes back to what I said at the beginning with the mental loss that people have in, in, in changing the ways that they consume books or stories.

Kyra Fox: I think as authors, a lot of us have the same mental blocks. Like it’s very still for me to underst. What would be the benefit of a Patreon compared to just putting it out there?

Michael Evans: Through the email, I think you will get it if you take, if you try and distance yourself from yourself, which is that, I’m sorry.

Michael Evans: Cause we’re like kind of trapped in our minds all the time, but we kind of overthink that overthink. And what I would say is that you are in really built for this model because in the beginning we were talking about kind of like, what is the lifestyle? What do, what is your kind of role [01:05:00] for subscriptions and not every author is going to enjoy.

Michael Evans: Having a subscription model is going to enjoy having that be part of their business. It’s not a ton of work if you’re only offering early access, but that just might not, it’s not for every author, but especially for the authors that are focused on building community and that are good at it. That can be the super power benefit that you’re not even thinking about.

Michael Evans: It is the exclusive community that you’re running and you’ve had experience doing it, running big promotions. You’re very good at talking with authors, engaging about books. This is a huge strength of yours. And I think as a reader, how you have to think about it is you might not be able to convince yourself as an author, that your stories are worth it, although they really are.

Michael Evans: They really are. That alone is all you need just early access to your stories. However, That access to community is something that is another [01:06:00] intangible that it is. It’s not even Earl it’s exclusive access, right? This is your community. That’s existing there. You can integrate things with discord. You can have an exclusive Facebook group that is page only however you wanna do it.

Michael Evans: Subscriber only group and on, on ream, as you’ve seen, we’re, we’re trying to put the community and the stories all in ones that you don’t have to use a bunch of different platforms, but that is huge because me as a reader, the Internet’s crazy. I see all this meaningless stuff on TikTok, largely authors keep it up, but TikTok has a lot of weird stuff and you go on all these platforms and you, you don’t find your home.

Michael Evans: You can read a million books, but like, AI’s gonna soon start like pumping out books in five to 10 years. This sounds crazy. But like, if that happens and whatever, right? Like, like where’s the humanity in this. And it has to be in this community. That’s forming around it. I think at least. [01:07:00] And I think if you, as a reader had the opportunity to be in a place that you had access to amazing stories and you felt safe, loved, like you had your friends in, I think you’d be willing to pay a coffee a month for it.

Michael Evans: And I think I’d be willing to market it.

Kyra Fox: Yeah, no, I absolutely agree with you. again, I’m really bad at marketing

Michael Evans: myself. Well, we’re gonna get into it now. So tell us what you’ve done so far. how in a given next 30 days, what, what would be some ways you’d think about bringing new readers into your, into your subscription, in this case but also into your books, right?

Michael Evans: Cause it’s kind of like, you gotta funnel ’em into you and then from you, they funnel into your subscription. If that makes sense.

Kyra Fox: Yeah. For people who know funnel yet funnels. Yeah. Me makes sense.

Michael Evans: I guess, for those who don’t know funnels, [01:08:00] I’m feeling like I’m like at a college party at the moment, all these big funnels, where are we?

Michael Evans: Where are we going into, but how you could think about it is that like we were kinda mentioning earlier. A subscription is where your super fans come, but super fans don’t just materialize. That would be really cool. If you could just like, press a button, give me super fans. It doesn’t happen like that. So how do you cultivate that relationship?

Michael Evans: So that then they’re then trusting that, oh, I can pay this person monthly. And sometimes that relationship can be cultivated over the course of three chapters. You can write three incredible chapters that they then trust that you’re gonna write the rest of the book and they want early access to it and will pay monthly.

Michael Evans: That’s like a serialized fiction model that’s done well specifically, a lot of Royal road authors have been able to parlay that into this whole lit art PG ecosystem. That’s only one way to think about it. And it’s not the only way you can think about it. You could do many things at once. Another way to think about it is this reader trusts who I am as an author.

Michael Evans: It always has to go back to trust, right? It’s relationship. [01:09:00] And they love who I am and want to support me and my brand because they wanna see it continue going on and whatever you feel comfortable providing community stories can be part of that. So how, I guess the question I’m asking you is how are you building trust with your readers currently?

Kyra Fox: So I think the key and I kind of lost from that because I got well in

Kyra Fox: updating showing them that you’re updating that. Does really well, she has the schedule of where expectation and, and meet that expectation, which important,

Kyra Fox: And one that are interested in, they go and look and they see that you are consistent and meeting your own promises, which is something that I’ve struggled to do [01:10:00] this since I opened my Patreon this year for all the reasons that we already talked about, which was probably why mistake to start doing anything before I finished writing my story.

Kyra Fox: And that, and transparency you have to be transparent. You can’t just be fear. You can’t just like, even when I haven’t posted, when I didn’t post a story, like I promise, then I always went on and posted why and gave them updates and made sort of the personal connection. I put photo them, myself, photos of my new office.

Kyra Fox: When we moved, I try to keep them involved as much as uncomfortable. Obviously you don’t have to be comfortable. Obviously everybody’s comfortable putting a pregnancy photo of themselves up on the but as much as I was comfortable involved, getting them involved in my life and what’s going on, and the reasons why I suddenly sort of dropped.

Kyra Fox: Off the grid and didn’t post as much as I promised that I post and all that, by the way. And I think this happens to everybody and Emilia as [01:11:00] I think the, the elder of the tribe on patron patron can, can test that you reevaluate each tier loft. I think it’s changed from like time since I started.

Kyra Fox: Yeah, I’ve done that. And I’m, I’m actually recently doing that as well. I’m currently getting rid of my $3 here cause it’s just like, yeah. it’s constantly reevaluating. See what you can and can’t do. what’s reasonable for you and what’s not, I’m in the process of understanding how to go trust with my reader.

Kyra Fox: It’s because I’m not entirely aware of my own capacities yet on Patreon. I I’m really reevaluating that every single week and every single month. And I think once I hit that sweet spot where I have where my benefits are that on that, on that line between what I’m able to give and be able, able to repurpose without it being repurposed.

Kyra Fox: But with it being new and fresh for my, for my benefactors, for my, [01:12:00] for people that are supporting me, then that’s when I can really start building really building trust. Cause right now I’m, I’m not confident enough in what I’m offering, that I can actually apply it to really build trust and. So one thing that you said, my, my website is authentic.

Kyra Fox: I think my website changed also about 40 times in the past year. because it takes you time to reach that again, that sweet spot where you can off where you’re, where, where you’re comfortable with what you’re offering. And that’s three people that say it you a year to really establish your voice as a writer.

Kyra Fox: And then just getting it where you want it to be. And I think I feel the same way about Patriot right now that, that I’m really not, not there yet in understanding where I can offer the novelties without, without compromising what I’m comfortable with. And readers can feel that you’re not confident they can feel when, when you’re promoting something confidently.

Kyra Fox: Like that’s why [01:13:00] my real work, I love doing the real, but why my, my done, cause I hate doing the, and even though it can be the same content you can feel where you’re comfortable and where you’re not and readers feel that too. So I don’t think I’m even in the position to really build trust with my readers.

Kyra Fox: Yeah. Cause no matter how much I try I’m I don’t trust myself being a while to. To have con like, not even to have confidence, but just to like, be like, yes, I’m promoting this because I think it, like, I’m promoting this at this tier because I think it’s worth it. It took me a while to get to that point. and sometimes I’m even like, oh, well, people like pay this much for just like an exclusive story.

Kyra Fox: Like, like, yeah. It surprises me too. sometimes when people actually do join specific tears that I’m like, wow never thought this would happen. But so yeah, it, it does take

Michael Evans: time. Some creators don’t emphasize their patron [01:14:00] at all. They don’t tell their subscribers why it’s important, why they should be there.

Michael Evans: And there’s a reason they don’t do that well, but then there’s some creators that focus their community on Patreon and they do so well. And I think that with whatever subscription platform you choose, you do have to like let people know because very, very clearly, like it has to be like front and center and a lot.

Michael Evans: And I’m curious on the email that you got those five subscribers on. Can you show us it? Because it seems like that worked. It did work, did like work.

Kyra Fox: So this is the broadcast that I sent out. As you can say, I always resend. And that was the, the number of recipients open rate, click rate, not great. Usually I have a much higher click rate.

Kyra Fox: On subscribers, which is actually not that high for 5,000 or something. So you can see, I had 18 people click the link and five of those converted. Wow. Which

Michael Evans: is, which is [01:15:00] that’s incredible. Yeah. That is that’s insane.

Kyra Fox: A bit over 20%.

Michael Evans: Okay. I mean that, yeah, that, that that’s really good. I mean that’s yeah.

Michael Evans: That’s strong. So this is, this is interesting. Can I, cause I think a mailing list is one of the, I mean, it is like at the end of the day, that the said way you can reach your readers. I think this is always like the best way that an author can let their readers know about Paton. Can I ask you how these readers got here?

Michael Evans: Cause 5,000 people who are looking at this, that’s really impressive. But as we all know as well, there’s a difference between a subscriber who comes in from the back of a book versus other ways. So do you know like how the majority of your subscribers got here?

Kyra Fox: Okay. So I will start with, if it’s pro aimer that I am back down to 3000 something, I called my list a couple of weeks ago and took off 2000 old subscribers that havet open an email in over two months.

Kyra Fox: A lot of these people came in organically. [01:16:00] I do have, the back matter of my book, a link and I started putting bonusing at the end of every. People to subscribe. And again, that’s low, but it’s low and organic. The people that come in from there are ideal readers, as you said. but the big boom that I had, I did a builder with book throne, and I got so many subscribers from that.

Kyra Fox: And the, most of the subscribers that I call were actually from there, I don’t do those builders a lot. And this one was exceptionally big. I did not expect that number. I admit I’ve never had the most subscribers I’ve ever gotten off the builder were, were around the one K region. this was really out there, and I’ve called most of a lot of them out over 60% out already by now.

Kyra Fox: But a lot of them are actually active, which is nice. A lot of them answered my, my onboarding sequence. I have like a, what are you reading now? Question? And [01:17:00] I actually think even one of them was one of the, one of the first

Michael Evans: patrons. Very cool. Yeah.

Kyra Fox: But I’ve been working on my list for ages. Like I really work hard on my list funnel and, and builders and giveaway, like the best, the best subscribers you can get is from focus, giveaways.

Kyra Fox: Like the ones I do for my birthday was just just 10 romance authors. Send out this giveaway to their newsletters or put them in their Facebook groups. And then 90% of the subscribers you get are organically readers that, that of romance authors, the second best way, like a closed niche focused or genre focused builder that you’re doing on your own and not through, external builder, like book their own and bookfunnel and stuff like that

Michael Evans: so I’m curious because yeah, the problem here seems to be, cuz like looking at this level, we’re gonna dive deeper, but like you have cuz you got five [01:18:00] subscribers from this that is mm-hmm that is 71% of your subscribers. Cause you have seven currently. That’s big though, because that means this one email, you know, might have, might have made you a hundred hundred plus dollars probably, you know, which is pretty cool over the course of a year.

Michael Evans: That’s that’s not that, but as 0.5% click specifically actually I guess you’re much closer to like a 0.3 on Theon link. That’s that’s kind of low. And I would be thinking about like, what if that becomes 3%, 3%? How does that change things? Emilia? I’m curious cuz you yes. Do this in your newsletter.

Michael Evans: What would be your click through rate?

Emilia Rose: So I only looked at it one time. The first time I sent it actually I’m really bad with, with data stuff. but the first time that I had it cl like I had a click through rate to [01:19:00] Patreon, it was at 10% of people who opened my email that day.

Michael Evans: Not trying to like, extrapolate and say anything here, but if you were able to get that number, that would be roughly 30 times higher than what your pat trying click through rate is now. And if that conversion health steady, that would, I mean, that, that one email, right. That would change everything. Right.

Michael Evans: We’re now at the point of like, we’re figuring out, so how do we get the click through rate up, let’s dive into your email logo,

Kyra Fox: My patron is live. And then I did a special launch offer, which I thought was like really nice, but apparently it was not that was not that great. I kind a teaser the week before.

Kyra Fox: And then I announced launch on my patron, which is the only face made, realize fiction stories other than radish. And then I had a special offer for three weeks at the end of the band of the month. Also check out my new haircut. I just got a new haircut with little personal detail. And then I just sort [01:20:00] of went, I think, is a lot going on here in terms of, of Verage maybe that’s a bit off putting, like, I don’t know if I would’ve received looking at it now.

Kyra Fox: I dunno if I would’ve read through this entire. looking at it like this. Yeah. Tell me great. Yeah.

Michael Evans: Emilia, you definitely take it away.

Emilia Rose: So I really like the the launch offer. Like that’s really cool. I would’ve never thought to do something like that. So, great job on that. I would say, if you, can you scroll up a little bit just to like, yeah, a little bit more here, so, okay.

Emilia Rose: The first place is you say the only place where you can read my serial fiction stories, other than radish, I would be more specific. Like, what are they getting? Like, are they, are they getting like a, a romance story? Are they getting like a robot story? Like, I know like [01:21:00] you write romance, but like, what story are you providing them?

Emilia Rose: Like put, throw in some tropes that people like can’t resist. and they’ll be like, oh, well I need to read the story right now. Like these are my favorite tropes. so that’s like one thing is definitely to be a little bit more specific with like what you’re providing on your subscription. and then if you scroll down.

Emilia Rose: I like the special offer. again, this is a lot of information. I would choose like three things like max. And just say, like, if you join my Patreon, you get early access to my content, signed paperbacks and exclusive March plus many more many more things that you wanna add. yeah. And then you could add a snippet, like at the end of like the first chapter of your serial fiction and make sure it has a cliff hanger.

Emilia Rose: So people are like, I’m already [01:22:00] invested in this story. I need to know what happens next. And then they’re like the only place like you could get it is either you could go to radish if you want, or you could join my, my Patreon, which is going to be cheaper down the line.

Michael Evans: Okay. That’s all really great. So I used to have this problem in my newsletters where I’d have very like click through eight.

Michael Evans: Like I would release a new book and my click through eight would be like two and a half percent. But this is for like a new release that my list wants. And my list is like very much like. They are my readers, like there’s 400 people who basically came in through the back of my books or through like coming to my website, watching a YouTube video.

Michael Evans: They’re people who know me. Right. So I knew I had a problem, but then I tried to analyze like, how do I read my own newsletters? Like when I’m, I’m a very AppD newsletter reader, like I’m always checking my email, reading a lot of things. I love reading newsletters. So I try to think about what newsletters do I like to read and the ones do I like to open.

Michael Evans: [01:23:00] And they’re never one telling me this, thing’s out. Read this. Never like if I love an author and there’s really only like less than a hand that I could count on that I love like, love, love, super, super fan. Right? I will, I will open theirs no matter what I will read through it. If they’re just gonna sell me all day long, I’m there for the selling.

Michael Evans: I’m there for the selling, but for like everyone else. And for me to get to the point to feel that way about someone I’m not, you know, me personally, I’m not very receptive to selling. And one thing I would suggest is when you think about someone’s attention span at seven seconds, you do not grab my attention in seven seconds here.

Michael Evans: I might be confused in seven seconds, but I’m not gonna have my attention grab. And I think that you’re already an incredible storyteller. You already are a great writer. Don’t get caught up in this marketing BS, write a chapter, write a chapter in your email. And then say to read the rest of it, it’s on Paton.

Michael Evans: Try [01:24:00] something like that. Like cut it off. Like she said, cut off the don’t have anything else. Oh, here are the benefits. Don’t bog them down to that. They can go to the Patreon page and read it. It’s just a repeat of what’s there. Just have ’em open up and be in the story. The headline is something like, I mean, I’m not like as familiar with your sub genre, so I’m not gonna be able to come with a great one, but it could literally be like, you know, you know, he sat me down and did this.

Michael Evans: I don’t know, like whatever like that, he could kind of grab me, cuz it’s so general, that might not be right. But you know, whatever, you are much better writer than I ever will be. Especially with this genre. But man, if you get that in, I’m in there for the story, right? Like, oh crap, what’s going on? I gotta scroll down my phone.

Michael Evans: Right. And then you get to the bottom. You’re like, you get that, that heart rate’s up. And you’re like, I gotta click. I gotta click. And then you click. Right. And you already were able to prove that a third of the people who make it to your Patreon page, roughly roughly a third will be a subscriber. So maybe we’ll see if that conversion rate holds up, but maybe we do an experiment like that,

Kyra Fox: especially now when I’m actually putting out the, when I finish the story and I’m gonna, [01:25:00] that’s the ebook up on the, on the Pearson.

Kyra Fox: That’s actually a really good way to get people

Michael Evans: AB tested. I love that. And you could even love AB testing AB test across campaigns, meaning, okay, let me, cuz you’re just starting. There’s no stakes when you first start like, oh this is my subscription. No one’s here. Okay, cool. You can write whatever you want.

Michael Evans: So before you make any promises to, to readers and stuff, you can go like, what if I sent, what if I wrote three chapters. In different stories, right. That are like, meant to be really short. Right. But I just wanna see what kind of writing, what kind of start gets them more excited and you can in very little time, figure out what kind of story may they want to really be a part of a world and really continue to pay you monthly in without going, oh, well I tried once, you know, well, I’m just gonna finish the book and finish five more books and then maybe I’ll try again a year from now.

Michael Evans: You can literally do it all on a span of like a week. Let me do three tries. See which one [01:26:00] works best

Kyra Fox: same. No I’m processing. I’m processing the information,

Michael Evans: because you have your readers here, right? Like, like, cause have to think about it. Cause this is really exciting. Like 5,000 years is a lot and it seems like the quality here, the open rate, 30 to 40%, right.

Michael Evans: That that’s healthy. And it seems like because you got people clicking the on and buying this, wasn’t just like, oh random people who have been to open the email, clicking on link and be like, oh, I don’t like her. Anyways. These are people who like you, they, they like you largely, right? Every list is not made equal.

Michael Evans: We all know that. Right. Everything’s super individual. But if you could think about it for yourself, if I can get 2% of the people on my list to convert, I am now making roughly $500 a month recurring. That’s pretty good. If they, if they’re on average paying you $5 a month, that would make me like really freaking happy.

Michael Evans: I think you can do it 2% of people here. You can do it. Yes. Yeah, first get to click. So after this, we decided to check out her Instagram, which is her main social media platform, and also another [01:27:00] way in which she promotes her subscription platform to her beaters. Kyra Fox. Here we go. Awesome. I mean, this is a really impressive following count.

Michael Evans: Let’s just check engagement. So your engagement overall is pretty low, but you did have a lot of things happen, but this isn’t bad at all. This isn’t terrible. 76. This is good. just checking the overall account. okay. Nine likes 21. So clearly the, these, this is a real, was that a real up here too?

Kyra Fox: No, just take into consideration that I did not post anything for an entire month for all of June.

Kyra Fox: I wasn’t online. So my engagement sort of dropped a bit during, I wasn’t there on June and, you know, I said everything. We started with engagement, if you’re not, and don’t engagement drastic, I’ve back for the last couple

Michael Evans: before that I was, yeah, this is why obviously the mailing list is, is important.

Michael Evans: Yeah. Cause it’s probably not your [01:28:00] engagement dropping. It’s your reach dropping like your engagement percentage is probably, I would guess staying constant, obviously I don’t have access to that data, but if you go in and see, it would be curious because I would be just as a good practice, like could this.

Michael Evans: Image right here that getting 12 likes and three comments, how much people are seeing it versus this one that got nine likes. but I can

Kyra Fox: show, I can tell you, I can look in my phone at the inside. That would be cool while you’re yeah, let’s, let’s do that. I just can’t remember my password. And so,

Michael Evans: and then it would be great to just see you know, point me, we’ll do three different posts that you promote Patreon on here, your subscription platform, and we could kind of break it down and see how you might be able to come up with a post that ultimately will entice to more people to click.

Kyra Fox: Okay. So the one with the butterflies, the talking vagina one, that’s the patron one. That’s for the steamy

Michael Evans: one. Okay, cool. So every Saturday, the wheel of smut spins. [01:29:00] Okay. Every Wednesday, a new steamy. Okay. This is cool.

Kyra Fox: Right. So, but because it’s, there’s a thing with images, cause also Instagram don’t wanna blame the algorithm, but the algorithm doesn’t promote images that much anymore.

Kyra Fox: But if you’re looking at,

Michael Evans: so one thing I would say is that when I look at this image, if I’m scrolling, I immediately think this is a promotion and it is, but that’s you don’t wanna people avoid these things, right? Yeah. So it looks like an ad. and I would maybe try and, and change that like the, the first image you see.

Michael Evans: If you wanna do a video, I think you could do an incredible video of you spinning this thing. Like that’s hilarious. And then to be like,

Kyra Fox: we, we, that’s a part of what we’re promoting is that we have, we, we do a live reaction. Like we don’t know what the prompt’s gonna be either. And then we record our live reaction for getting the prompt when the win wins wheels, spin mm-hmm I just haven’t gone around to actually posting the [01:30:00] video yet.

Kyra Fox: Oh,

Michael Evans: okay. Yeah. That to me is so funny, but yeah, I would always think about for anyone who’s like posting an image, like, like try and make it native, try and make it relatable to the platform. Because if I can see something and be like, this is a promotion, like, like when I see this image, I don’t really have a reason to want to go

Kyra Fox: to the page.

Kyra Fox: Like, even if you wanna do a still image, I would do something like a steamy quote that people can’t resist. And they’re like, oh, I could only get this on Patreon. Let me go join or something like that. But just to drive your point home, if you scroll a bit lower on the, on my feed and that one got, had less accounts, accounts, counts reach, but more engagement, even though it still kinda looks like an ad, but because it has a Simi factor on it.

Michael Evans: Oh, interesting. Oh yeah. I know. It definitely looks like an a, [01:31:00] but. That’s. Yeah.

Kyra Fox: Cause I have, I have the OCD factor where I have to have like the, the grave block that it’s up there in between my, after I go crazy that my doesn’t look pretty.

Michael Evans: I understand Instagram. Okay. Here’s here’s my advice on this, on like, I know a lot of people get caught up on like Instagram branding.

Michael Evans: Like it’s important. It is, but it’s kind of like a company with one human being talking about like culture and writing up like an employee memo and all these things. Like it’s still just you and writing that employee memo, doing all of that, like culture stuff, like might make you feel good, but it’s not going to get you any closer to having an employee.

Michael Evans: So until you have all these readers that you can then think about that for do not waste your mental on that’s my advice. No,

Kyra Fox: I totally agree with you. And I’ve been trying to stop soft, but I

Michael Evans: can, I understand that I’m [01:32:00] very

Kyra Fox: compelled. I, no you don’t under, I don’t think you do. If you would’ve seen my feed before real, I used to have a feed where I’d have, like, I do like these crazy interconnected stuff, like photos that would cut in the middle and then connect or backgrounds insane.

Kyra Fox: And. Very complicated, but it looked amazingly beautiful and it was just so much work. And honestly, since real came out, I’ve been, I’ve been less, here that for them. I just gonna talk about that. I I’ve been less, crazy, but still, but see this one has this, but it has a book cover on it. So people are more likely to click if they’re readers.

Kyra Fox: And then I say to you real, which is achieving,

Michael Evans: this is really good. I really like this one thing I would say is that this comment, Hmm. Because like, it’s almost like you have to like [01:33:00] work to get to the link. And I know Instagram, this is why, obviously not news to anyone listening, but mailing list is better just because you own the platform.

Michael Evans: They don’t wanna keep you on it. You know, you could like actually do things. Obviously Instagram wants to keep everyone inside of Instagram, but if I’m like intrigued by this, this is a lot of text. I might not actually get around to reading

Kyra Fox: this. I would put more romance based hashtags, like spicy romance rather than like Patreon hashtags, but, and just take that with the greatest salt, because I don’t usually promote my Patreon through social media because it’s a lot harder I find.

Kyra Fox: But you want your fans to be supporting you on Patreon? Like if you just say like, if somebody finds you through the PA Patreon hashtag, like they, they might come over and support you, but they don’t know who you are. Like, it’s gonna be like completely random. Yeah. [01:34:00]

Michael Evans: And also as well, Instagram does everything, the algorithm based off of engagement with specific audiences.

Michael Evans: So if it sees that when you are on the Patreon hashtag that you’re not performing well, because Patreon’s broad, right? It could be anyone’s interest in anything. They’re not gonna then promote you out more. Meanwhile, if you focused all on spicy books, odds are, there’s a higher proportion of those people who will engage positively with this post.

Michael Evans: And therefore you will gain more reach, but you have to kind of think about it like a video game, because a post does better. Doesn’t mean it’s prettier doesn’t mean it’s actually more entertaining, but it engaged people more. And I think there’s a lot of problems with this gamification of the internet hunts.

Michael Evans: And it’s why, hopefully we can, you. Exist on our, on subscription platforms and have these safe places that we create. But if you’re trying to recruit people on these platforms, it’s somewhat useful to think about it like that. Like, okay, I’m entering this game. The high score is likes. How can I get those things while [01:35:00] maintaining true to my brand?

Michael Evans: Because I’m not just going for random likes, I’m trying to beat the spicy book, talk romance game, things that I do

Kyra Fox: on Instagram. I just, I just copy to TikTok.

Michael Evans: I would copy the talk’s great. Like don’t, don’t spend any extra effort on it, especially at this stage. but don’t feel a pressure and beat yourself up about like, oh, well, I’m not doing well on TikTok.

Michael Evans: You’re not focused on that. You’re trying to bring people from Instagram to your mailing list here, subscription platform or Instagram to your books, to your mailing list, your subscription platform. Eventually you, you want ’em on your subscription platform, but there’s many ways to get there. I wouldn’t think about any other way, because if you just dial in on Instagram and become incredible at this game, I was, I

Kyra Fox: had a really good engagement before I dropped off the grid because that was my baby.

Kyra Fox: Sure. Decided couple week early. And I basically went out of commission all June. I had a really, really good engagement before that. I I, hit the, the, between three to 7% engagement post when the, when the industry average is one from [01:36:00] five to two. Wow. Yeah, I was, yeah, those are way older. I was really, I was, yeah, these are good.

Kyra Fox: Real we’re really my I’m. Into reels. I love reels. I really need to focus more on reels and stop doing the stupid posts that I do.

Michael Evans: Well reels actually as well. I will say, how Instagram’s evolving, I think is actually positively in your favor. Not only because it’s evolving towards reels, but because the platform’s evolving into one, that’s much more open for discovery because the platform used to be very hard to get your content discovered on.

Michael Evans: If you didn’t have existing followers, it just turned into like a big billboard. I felt like, but they’ve kind of seen the talks kind of move of opening up and making discovery easier for everyone. so you can think about it, like in a way you’re building a brand as a creator on Instagram, as well as like being an author.

Michael Evans: So [01:37:00] you almost want to think about what is your content tilt? There’s this actually publication called the tilt and it’s founded by Joe Pelozi, who is the first guy to use the word content marketing. he’s been an entrepreneur in the internet for 20 years. I actually wrote an article in there. So you can, you can go check it out.

Michael Evans: It’s about content creation. but the tilt is all about analyzing what works in content and what’s your little spin on it and sticking to that brand and using that to market your larger business and as authors. I mean, that’s effectively how you’re using these platforms. So I I’d really look at a publication like the tilt, the published press is another newsletter.

Michael Evans: They also have a YouTube channel called Colin and Samir. All of this will be linked down in the comments. These are good publications about being a digital creator, because what you’re competing with on a platform like Instagram and TikTok are a bunch of people who are focused on growing businesses, just on those platforms.

Michael Evans: They don’t have other products to sell. They just wanna get views. And you can feel like that puts you at a disadvantage. No, it puts you at an amazing advantage. You have a [01:38:00] larger moat, you have so much more to offer community that you can really like in the long run do so well, not only in these platforms, but as an author, but in the beginning, you have to figure out what are these people doing?

Michael Evans: What’s working and how can I be a little different? And it’s a little bit of a new skillset for authors, but it’s very easy to master. And the hardest part is the ideas and that tends to be what writer’s the best at. So I, I think if you hone in on watching a few of the right videos and reading a few of the articles, all free stuff that you’ll be able to crush it at reels.

Michael Evans: Like you, there’s no reason why you couldn’t get a hundred thousand views in the video on reels. There’s no reason why there’s nothing holding you back.

Kyra Fox: I agree with you. Why getting a hundred thousand views on my reel?

Michael Evans: We can watch one, actually.

Kyra Fox: You’re very welcome to watch on.

Kyra Fox: You can watch the last one

Michael Evans: i, which one are you proud of? And I’m not trying to, like, I’m not trying to then tear it down. I wanna, I wanna see one that you think is one of your better reels. Oh,

Kyra Fox: that one, the one I saying with my back go up that was, people died from that one. Like, wouldn’t stop commenting, but this one, I think that’s [01:39:00] because no, not that one.

Kyra Fox: Now that one more up, more up. I think above the wheel of, yeah, the one above the, of

Michael Evans: so this, yeah. Okay. Let’s watch it.

Kyra Fox: Hear the music.

Michael Evans: Okay. Yeah. That, that’s funny. That’s funny. It’s it’s short and good. Yeah. one thing would be, I like it a lot, but if I read spicy romance, no offense. Like I don’t care about your back.

Kyra Fox: Yes. But that brings eyes on because this is very, that’s exactly feeding into the algorithm. It’s like, uh an audio that was very successful and basically got a lot of eyes on the reel and it’s sort of funny and that’s [01:40:00] exactly what gets people to want to look at the rest of your content.

Kyra Fox: Yeah. And then I have. Wait, I have reel like that and I try to post at a least to a day where one of them is more about my writing and my writing style, my books. And one of them’s a bit more, you know, writing like writing journey a bit more. MEIC a bit more a bit more for, for fun and engagement. Okay.

Kyra Fox: And those, by the way, tend to get the most engagement. And then the end engagement is what pushes you off in the algebra. Well, so you have to lot how to that,

Michael Evans: there’s, there’s a fine line engagement. Isn’t all. It’s just like with your newsletter subscribers, all engagement is not created equal. And ultimately these platforms are looking for engagement with the same people.

Michael Evans: So you have to think about who am I speaking to? And each post needs to essentially speak to the same person, because when you actually start to blow up an account, it’s not because one post did well, but it’s because the there’s data that you see people going from one post to another, to another, and still having [01:41:00] high retention, watching most of it and engaging with all of it.

Michael Evans: That’s when an account blows up. Right. And if I’m looking at your account now, and I’m a spicy answer reader, cuz that’s who you want. You don’t, you don’t want anyone else. If I see that writing post I’m again, you can throw fun post there, but if you’re focused on playing the game, right, and people might be listening to me like this is not fun and that’s okay.

Michael Evans: Like make it fun, make it sustainable. But if you’re focused on views, right. How to bring more people in, you need to niche out and just focus on. Ultimately what you’re trying to sell, which is spicy romance.

Kyra Fox: So if you look at, at a lot of my other reel, you see me hold my book, talking about my niche, which is heroes.

Kyra Fox: Yes. So I I, really like the, the fun, general writing life reels are more like something I do once or twice a week. Yeah. And then the rest, the cinnamon roll alphas, let’s normalize on getting therapy. I have the ones where I’m holding my bone and, and I [01:42:00] understand what you’re saying and you’re right.

Kyra Fox: It’s, it’s very solid advice. But I like playing with that. First of all, cause it’s fun and I enjoy it. Okay.

Michael Evans: Love making it. No. Then, then, then continue it cause your passion. Yeah. Your passion matters more. And what you enjoy matters more. One, one anecdote I’ll share though is there’s a lot of creators on YouTube because YouTube’s a long form platform typically who are now going into shorts and the psychology of like short form videos, completely different from long form video from images, from text posts is just a different beast.

Michael Evans: And what some are noticing that are creating content off brand so that aren’t directed towards precisely their niche is that they’re funneling the wrong viewers into their, into their brand. And then they’re future videos are having less initial engagement and it they’re actually dropping off even after they blow up, like they’ll blow up an account that was doing well, will blow up more because of shorts, but then we’ll get hurt by it in the long run.

Michael Evans: Yeah. So you don’t wanna send a false signal. That’s my only [01:43:00] caveat.

Kyra Fox: Yeah. So that’s, that’s exactly why I sort of, 2080, I like to give myself the 20% of like the fun, silly riding life reel. And then I have like the 80%, which is all about my, niche about the alpha roll, about the, spicy romance. a lot, a lot of my reels.

Kyra Fox: Aren’t my face. Even though those tend to be really well it’s, book, trailer, like the one that you saw for the, for the Patriot. and I do. And I’m not, I’m not disputing you, Michael. So what you said is it’s very true and it’s very, and it’s very, very exact observation about how, how promotion on social media works.

Kyra Fox: But I do think you still have to maintain element of comic. I know a lot of people just hate doing reels and it shows and the reels will never explode cause they hate doing reals and people that put their faces out there and you can see they’re uncomfortable. And I think this element of fun really preserves for me the joy of real cause.[01:44:00]

Kyra Fox: Cause I like being silly. I don’t like just being serious all the time. Like Thero thing a lot of the time that when I talk about it, it’s very serious. Like it’s putting up a reel that talks about less normalized men getting therapy in romance books is very heavy reel to put up. So I, I, for me as well, and not just for my readers and not just for my audience, I like lightening things up.

Kyra Fox: And I think every everything in the end needs to be inside. your conflict zone, a lot of people prefer to just talk about their books and it’s both book trailers or just books, both photos of their books. And don’t like to put themselves out there or if they do, they only talk about their books. and everything looks legitimate.

Kyra Fox: Everything needs to be within scope of what you’re comfortable with. I like being silly sometimes

Michael Evans: Yeah. I agree. And most of the videos that tend to do well on spicy book talk, at least, cuz I have actually quite a bit of familiar with it. I’ve have watched it many times tend to be jokes. Like one video that I remember like explicitly is like [01:45:00] I’m on books is her name.

Michael Evans: And she does very well in tech talk. She’s someone to take inspiration from. she was like reading in her bed and like in the cover and is like, like her mom like knocks the door, like fake mom, mom, what are you reading? And then, you know, and then immediately that’s like, you know, you connect to that.

Michael Evans: And it’s funny. So I think there’s ways to always blend both, but I, 1000% agree with you because at the end of the day, we’re not Instagrammers. We’re not Facebook adders. We’re not Amazon ad IANS, whatever. We’re not, we’re not digital marketers. We’re we’re writers and storytellers. And over the long run, that is what will make you successful and keep you happy.

Michael Evans: And it’s not worth sacrificing an ephemeral big blow up on a 15 second video to, for what like at the end of the day. Like even if you make some money off of it, even if it’s a lot, like if you can’t keep it up for 10 years, [01:46:00] like why.

Kyra Fox: If you would’ve told like one video would give you like 1 million, it’d say, yeah, it’s worth it.

Michael Evans: That come on. That’s like such an outlier. I don’t think that’s like actually ever officially happened. Right. Because if that the off, but, but that means they have an incredible book and people were talking about it probably based off of the video, which means that they could have found it anyway.

Michael Evans: Didn’t need to be through that video. And they still would’ve probably made a lot of money. So that’s one thing I will say. They designed these social platforms like a game and want us to be addicted to it. They want us to be addicted to Amazon. They want us to be addicted to the advertising. They want us to be addicted to all these methods of promotion, but like the best ways to recognize the game exists and not play it.

Kyra Fox: It’s hard For me to comment on that. like laughing, Emilia laughing. Cause she knows, she knows what I’m about to say. as, as much as I’m I’m I’m I would my soul burning to get on the vendetta train that you started [01:47:00] here. I don’t think you can not play the game if you’re, unless you’re, you know, you are smarter than me and married a trust fund baby rather than a struggling med student.

Kyra Fox: You can’t really not do the game if you want to be able to San a business, but

Michael Evans: I don’t think you are though. You’re not.

Kyra Fox: No. So you’re not playing the game my, my before. So, so exactly. That’s yeah. Before I am financially in my career,

Michael Evans: no, that’s not true. That’s not true. You can’t, you can’t say that about yourself.

Kyra Fox: No, so, no, I accept that this is more to do with the fact that I really took, sort of AME year in my, in my career that in publishing and I’ve really been working on and, you know, back off it stuff more than, than, than from this front lines. But I think back what I said before that, that, and this is something that everybody has to learn [01:48:00] the hard way, no matter what I say or says, or you say, or David Gorin says, or, or the Goran says, or, or anybody says the biggest guru of indie publishing would say something that everybody needs to learn, the hard way is the hard limits.

Kyra Fox: What, what they’re comfortable with. It’s not something that anybody could ever tell you. it’s something you have to learn the hard way. And I think part of not playing the game is the part that you’re talking about, of not playing the game is, is understanding those hard limits. Like I won’t change my covers, just so I can run Amazon ads.

Kyra Fox: I won’t go around growling doing. Community standard preventive courses, which they have forced me to take once. And I refuse to take again since a giant BS, just so they unfree my Facebook, uh ad account, which have been frozen for over a year because I just [01:49:00] refuse to do that. It’s just not worth it for me.

Kyra Fox: No matter how much the face Facebook ads could sell for me, I refuse to do that. I refuse to play into that stupid F game that, that they play in the name of Lord knows what I refuse, I refuse tick off for a very long time and giving it a chance now. But again, everything’s in the scope of what I’m comfortable with.

Kyra Fox: I will never do anything I’m not comfortable with. And I think that’s what everybody needs to understand that when, when you say don’t play the game, I mean, don’t fall down the rabbit hole of what everybody tells you, you have to do to be successful. Cause first of all, there’s no magic formula. If there was a magic formula, somebody would’ve been, billionaire iPing it.

Kyra Fox: And selling it as the formula comes becoming an overnight success. And, it’s, it’s not worth it. It’s not worth breaking your hard limits, for things that make you uncomfortable, that to sell another book and that’s not playing into the game, that’s understanding that, that the game isn’t [01:50:00] worth it, that to sell another book, but you do have to do stuff and put yourself out there to succeed.

Kyra Fox: You have. Engage in the game, realize what way is comfortable for you? So for a long time, I didn’t wanna do TikTok and still like, I don’t wanna do TikTok. but I realize that it sells books for a lot of people. And that just might not be something that I’m willing to participate in. Like, I do have TikTok accounts, but it’s not something that I wanna Fe like put my energy towards constantly like other authors do I have my energy elsewhere where I know will work for me.

Michael Evans: And I agree completely. And the, my, my own story with that is that I used to kind of like, I was a, I was trapped in that system of sorts, whether it was Facebook ads, Amazon ads spending a lot of money out of pocket betting on read three. Then I did [01:51:00] YouTube and TikTok trying to think that, oh, that would do it for me.

Michael Evans: And I mean, that’s partially what inspired me to be involved with ream and trying to build this place, that centers around community and takes all the noise out of it. And is just about that relationship between the reader and the author, cuz that’s what I want to do. And it felt like there was no good place to do it, but also in my own career, I’m not on TikTok.

Michael Evans: I’m not on Instagram reels. I’m not trying to run Facebook and Amazon ads. What I find enjoyable is yeah, there’s a lot of principles of psychology and content that you can learn from these. I, like I said, I like reading newsletters. I kind of like reading, like nerdy newsletters that are like philosophical and very deep, like thoughtful about life.

Michael Evans: So I just wanna like write those and share them with the world and like, yes, if they’re good, people will share them with other people. and I’m sure that could be something that like, I’m hoping it works. I’m not just flailing. I have a strategy, but you know, you don’t need to [01:52:00] play the TikTok game.

Michael Evans: Precisely what Emilia said, but if you want to, and you like it, not here are the rules, but here are some guidelines, but like every great author does break them.

Kyra Fox: Yeah. I, I agree. there, there are rules in life that are meant to be broken, like they’re swimmer or not like don’t go around certain people, but but all the algorithm rules they’re BS, they really are.

Kyra Fox: And I think one of the things that, one of, one of the people that taught me, this was Lauren Lane which she used to have insane Instagram cousins. And I used to, I wanna take copy her, but I used to. Draw some inspiration inspirations from Instagram. There’s one thing I learned like a blog post on our website.

Kyra Fox: Cause I learned that very, very hard in the beginning of my career when I was going to publishing houses and I didn’t wanna go on Instagram. I didn’t want to go on Facebook and have a reader group and I didn’t wanna do all this stuff, [01:53:00] but they told me that I had to, she, she, she started drag. She just now for a time spring into indie, she was cat until now.

Kyra Fox: And she put up a post and she said, I just quit everything because it wasn’t for me. And I was doing it. It was nice. And it was aesthetic and it looked pretty and everything was up to brand. And, but I never felt comfortable with it. And if there was one thing I learned, during my year, then maybe it’s easy to talk when you’re already a multi international, but seller in four different languages.

Kyra Fox: It’s easy to say, but, but she said like this, this isn’t for me. And she killed her newsletter and started it over, like from scratch. And in the first newsletter in, in her onboarding sequence, she said, I’m not gonna send you a newsletter every week. I’m not gonna send a newsletter every other week or every month.

Kyra Fox: I’m sending newsletters when I’m comfortable sending newsletters. And sometimes she sends a newsletter saying my new book’s on preorder. Sometimes you sends a newsletter saying, Hey, look, I gave my dog a haircut. Look how cute [01:54:00] she has like this Pomeranian Fordor. Well, cute. Look at this. Our husband’s, median, food blogger.

Kyra Fox: He. Hilarious and hilarious comedy food blog. It’s it’s, it’s, it’s really funny. So sometimes he just puts him up and says, and says, Anthony had the funniest blog today. You guys really have to see, and it’s not promotional. So he’s just really proud of him. it’s free. So you just go to YouTube and watch it.

Kyra Fox: And I think I’m not there yet to completely drop everything that I don’t wanna do. I’m not comfortable not sending my newsletter out at least a couple of times a month. even though I kind of took a, a page out of her book and did say, look guys, there are months that you’ll get two newsletters a month.

Kyra Fox: There are months that you’ll get one every week there months that maybe you’ll get even more than one a week, one week. If I have something really exciting going on, but I’m not gonna say I’m gonna send you a newsletter every week or every other week, which I used to do. and again, I’m not big like her, I’m not at the [01:55:00] place that she’s at, where she’s been living off her books and has an insane fan base that followed her to her private social media platform that she opened on her website, which is closed and only her fans can go into.

Kyra Fox: So I’m not there, but I want to be there one day. I wanna be able to say that. And I think it’s something that we should all aspire to being able to say that, being able to say, I’m not doing more than I’m comfortable with, to promote books. Cause my books and my brand and what I write speaks for them fix for.

Kyra Fox: She’s back on Instagram, by the way, she posts like whatever she wants to, she just posts something and everything gets insane engagement because she has, insane, super fan loyal, super fan base. And if, if you’re talking to me about my, my mega aspiration as in mouth or fear at that, I wanna be able to just do things at my own pace, how I wanna do them and how I’m comfortable doing them and still have my, my loyal, super fan base [01:56:00] that will always follow me and always want to hear from me no matter when it is.

Kyra Fox: And I think that’s how we, we should aspire to play the game as an idea,

Michael Evans: couldn’t agree more. This is, this is beautiful. And I think you’re really embodying what I believe to be the mindset of a subscription author, the subscription author mindset, because ultimately you get to own your community own this space, the internet, no distractions.

Michael Evans: So you and your readers, and just like you wanna be sustainable and work on your own terms and be able to do what you want. You get to be able to one do that in your subscription platform. You don’t have to have a specific cover. There’s no set rules. This is where people come when they love you. And you get to have that monthly income.

Michael Evans: That, you know, a platform like Amazon would never want you to have because they want you rat racing to continue playing their game, but you get to design your own little world. [01:57:00] And I think that’s the big benefit of it. And I think hopefully today we were able to help you cake one step closer to it. And as we close things up, I do have one last question for you, Kyra, which is what are your takeaways?

Michael Evans: And after today, or I guess before today, and then after you’ve experienced this, what would be some of the things you’d wanna share with your fellow writers about you, about what you’ve learned today about this experience? Anything I hope you’ve learned something. If you don’t learn anything that’s okay.

Michael Evans: Just tell us that’s okay.

Kyra Fox: Think my biggest Patreon takeaway would be that to keep things simple. like I think I overdid myself out of, again, maybe out of the, what need to play the game, I guess. and I think really keeping it simple and, deliverable is, is something that, that I’ve definitely taken today.

Kyra Fox: Also not to be afraid to [01:58:00] experiment of things that work for Patriot, like, and how to, and things that work in, in drawing in, Quarter, cause it’s new for everybody. It’s like it’s reader training and reader training is more than just reminding them all the time that I have. It’s really getting them into it.

Kyra Fox: Which I think I’ve kind of floundered at so far. also you guys are really nice and I had a really great time talking to you. Like I knew, I knew I would, it was, it was, I just looked at the clock and it it’s been two and a half hours. We’re still yammering yammering it out. And it’s really nice cuz it didn’t feel the time by.

Michael Evans: That, that was really fun. I’m really glad too. That makes me so happy. And I think that’s all amazing takeaways. I’m gonna let, we always like to share like kind of a closing message. And that was our closing message from Kyra because she was our star of this podcast. I can’t thank her enough for like coming on and doing this.

Michael Evans: And if this is something you wanna see us do [01:59:00] again, like let us let us know because we wanna help more people. And we don’t know everything. We don’t know most things, but if we can help even a few of you just a little bit, I think that’s cool. So anyways, thank you all for listening slash watching could be cool if you’re listening to actually going to YouTube and.

Michael Evans: There’s a whole bookmark of like every single section. So I’ll like make sure to star the sections that like are really key to watch where you can see the, the screen of specifically Kyra’s screenshots. Otherwise you heard a lot about our Facebook group. It’s a cool place to join and we’ll have more coming soon.

Michael Evans: Probably another awesome episode next week. Well, hopefully awesome. Anyways, have a great day, everyone and happy writing.

Links Referenced in Podcast:

• Eden Books: https://edenbooks.org/
• Superfans by David Gaughran: https://davidgaughran.com/books/strangers-to-superfans/
• Nebula: https://nebula.app/
• Michael’s Article in The Tilt: https://www.thetilt.com/audience/content-curation
• Publish Press: https://www.thepublishpress.com/