Posted on October 23, 2022
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From promoting your subscription to determining your pricing and rewards, these are the 10 steps you can take to go from zero to $100k+ per year on your subscription as a fiction author.
Don’t forget to Review/rate Subscriptions for Authors on your favorite podcast distributor! It really helps us out :).
Relevant Links:
Writer’s Guide to Serial Fiction Platforms: https://subscriptionsforauthors.com/an-authors-guide-to-serial-fiction-websites/
#16 Episode Outline:
0:00 – 2:14 Introduction and Context
2:14 – 6:17 Step 1: Knowing Your Readers
6:17 – 10:01 Step 2: Getting into the Subscription Mindset
10:01 – 17:46 Step 3: What Should You Offer as Rewards?
17:46 – 24:20 Step 4: How Should You Price Your Subscription?
24:20 – 31:45 Step 5: Where should you host your subscription? Technology + tools to make subscriptions happen.
31:45 – 36:54 Step 6: Promoting Your Subscription
36:54 – 40:41 Step 7: How to Manage Your Subscription and Keep Your Readers Happy
40:41 – 46:04 Step 8: Iterating Your Subscription
46:04 – 52:56 Step 9: Scaling Your Subscription
52:56 – 58:42 Step 10: Making A Subscription Sustainable for the Long Run
10 Takeaways from Episode:
- Developing real relationships with readers is often the best way to learn about them.
- Focus less on gaining new readers, and more on making your existing ones happier (even if you only have five readers).
- Rewards for your subscription depend on (1) what is best for you as a writer, (2) your reader’s relationship to you and your stories, (3) your readers’ relationship to reading in their life.
- Be wary of low pricing, which often can hurt engagement and churn for your subscription (leading to more reader cancellations).
- Make the tech simple and what works best for you and your readers.
- Your subscription is not something for cold audiences but instead a way to nurture existing readers and superfans. Promote accordingly!
- Underpromise and overdeliver. And don’t burn yourself out with extremely high expectations.
- Poll your readers consistently and add new tiers + tweak your offerings accordingly.
- Scale doesn’t have to come from more subscribers, but instead from deeper relationships. Upselling existing subscribers to higher-priced tiers is a way to scale your revenue without more readers.
- Subscriptions make you more accountable to the desires of your readers with halo effects across your author business.
#16 Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Michael Evans: If you’ve been wondering how you should start a subscription as an author and grow that subscription, starting from a few subscribers all the way up to being able to make six figures a year from subs. And this is the podcast for you. We’re gonna be going through 10 steps to go from zero to a hundred thousand dollars a year in subscriptions, and it’ll be me talking with Emilia Rose, who has been making a hundred thousand dollars plus a year from subscriptions for the last three years.
[00:00:23] Michael Evans: It’s a really rich conversation with actual steps for you to follow and kind of map what your journey through the subscription process could look like. The first four steps we’re gonna really be focusing. , Knowing your readers, knowing what tiers and prices you should do the rewards. Kind of mapping out what this looks like, and then the rest of the steps will all be focused on how you can put it into practice, how you can iterate on your subscription, how you can promote it, and ultimately grow it so that you can make a full-time living from your writing.
[00:00:52] Michael Evans: If this is your first time listening to Subscriptions for Authors podcast, I’m your co-host Michael Evans. I’m a science fiction thriller, author of 12 novels, [00:01:00] and I’m currently in college and have worked on a bunch of startups in the creator economy space. I’ve been at YouTube before ticker and a live streamer, so come from lots of different areas in the creator world, but my passion is fiction and writing stories about the future. and I host this with Emilia Rose, she’s our resident subscription superstar. She makes a hundred thousand dollars plus a year just from subscriptions alone and is a Steamy romance author with over 20. Published, oftentimes we bring on amazing guests who either are successful in subscriptions or doing really cool things in the writing industry that we want to bring to you today.
[00:01:30] Michael Evans: This is just an episode with me and Emilia, and I think you’ll find this one really, really interesting. Before we get into the episode, I just wanna remind you that the best way you can help out this podcast is sharing it with your friends. So if you enjoy this episode, share it with a writer friend who either has a subscription, is interested in starting one, or just would benefit from this kind of overview of how you can take a new business segment, diversify your revenue streams, and really grow it and make a living in a really interesting.
[00:01:57] Michael Evans: As a writer. So I hope this podcast helps you. We [00:02:00] always appreciate your feedback, so feel free to contact us at our email and the description below. We also have a bunch of other exciting links that might be able to help you on your subscription journey. So I hope this is all fun stuff.
[00:02:11] Michael Evans: We’re gonna get into this podcast now, a conversation between me and Emelia about how you can grow your subscription. I’m excited for this one.
[00:02:18] Michael Evans: Before you could start a subscription or really start anything as writer, the first step is you have to know your readers. And I’m curious, when I ask you that question, who are your readers? What’s your answer and what is your advice to authors who are trying to answer that question themselves?
[00:02:35] Emilia Rose: So I think the first thing when I look at my readers, usually people wanna go off like demographics and stuff, which is perfectly fine. And that’s really helpful information, but a lot of times you don’t really, from the retailers that we have now, they don’t really give you a lot of that information.
[00:02:50] Emilia Rose: So what I found really important to know my readers is to actually know them actually talk to them, see what they like, who they are, what stories they really [00:03:00] connect with and from there, You can sort of start fleshing out what you want in your subscription and how you want it to set it up.
[00:03:07] Emilia Rose: They will really like that connection as well when you start asking them questions and really wanting to like, spend time even virtually with them.
[00:03:14] Michael Evans: Knowing your readers is really important, but sometimes, when you’re first starting out, especially, my question is always like, I don’t have any readers yet.
[00:03:23] Michael Evans: So sometimes I have to think about myself in that and think about what do I like to read and who are other people who probably like to read those kinds of things. And you were talking about demographics and that there’s times not always helpful. But then thinking about our readers as like one monolithic entity also can be a bit like difficult.
[00:03:43] Michael Evans: Like each of our readers are like individual people, which is why getting to know them matters.
[00:03:49] Emilia Rose: I don’t wanna say it’s harmful to think of them as just like one group. At least for me it kind of is because once you form that group in your mind, I feel like you’re a lot, a lot more [00:04:00] distant from them.
[00:04:00] Emilia Rose: Rather than if you’re like, actually in the group and you’re like talking to people and you’re, you’re actually a real person to them and not just an author who you could never contact or never talked to. It really helps kind of for more of a community.
[00:04:14] Michael Evans: And that’s also the thing where some people might be wondering, well, I’m not gonna literally get to know all of my readers.
[00:04:20] Michael Evans: Like, yeah, that’s quite difficult, especially if you have, like Emilia, thousands of people subscribed to each month. You might even know a, a good bit of your subscribers, but you won’t know maybe your readers who are buying your books in a retailer who like you, but aren’t maybe a super fan and your subscription.
[00:04:36] Michael Evans: So one thing that I find helpful is to come up with like, segments of your readers. So don’t, don’t think of them as one being but, and not even like one monolithic community, but like a subset of cus and I will say it’s always gonna be reductive when you do this kind of thing cuz you’re drawing your own boundaries.
[00:04:54] Michael Evans: But I think it’s, it’s sometimes important to be like, You know, there’s a segment of my readers who [00:05:00] really enjoy this trope. They really enjoy like this specific subgenre within a subgenre and they love that. Or maybe you do think about it demographically, cuz that can sometimes be helpful. These are generalizations of course, but some readers have more familiarity with certain platforms and certain monetization methods than other readers.
[00:05:19] Michael Evans: When it comes to subscriptions. People who are Gen Z millennials, like everyone knows what subscriptions are. Every creator that we’ve been growing up with, you know, probably either has subscription or one of their friends has subscriptions. So as fans, as people who love creative content, it’s very normal to be like, Oh, I know what a description is.
[00:05:37] Michael Evans: I might not even be scribed to one myself, but I would consider it. Or maybe I already am subscribed to one. So it’s something that there’s a familiarity with, whereas, Older demographics. And these are, it’s, again, this is generalizing, but they definitely are subscribed to things probably like their cell phone bill
[00:05:52] Michael Evans: They’re probably subscribed to something like Amazon Pride, maybe a Kindle Unlimited, but they might not be subscribed to an individual creator. That concept [00:06:00] mm-hmm. might be foreign them and the platforms that you use to do that also might be foreign them, which doesn’t make it impossible, but it might change your messaging.
[00:06:07] Michael Evans: It also might change, Yeah. What kind of rewards which we’ll get into that you give to each of these segments.
[00:06:12] Michael Evans: So you now know who your readers are, at least have an idea. Maybe you’ve made like a little bit of a reader profile, some reader profiles to map out what your actual readers are like.
[00:06:23] Michael Evans: Or maybe even better, you actually have a few friends who are your reader. That you actually know and can think this is what they like, this is who they are, this is what I might wanna write next. But now you’re thinking, I’m writing and I wanna be able to monetize my creative work through a subscription, but how do I do that?
[00:06:40] Michael Evans: So step two, let’s think before even actual mechanics of it, the mindset, how do you change your mindset to go from, I’m selling books I put on retailers, and now I have subscription. What is that mindset and how do you make that shift?
[00:06:54] Emilia Rose: That’s really hard for a lot of authors because we’ve been trained so much.
[00:06:58] Emilia Rose: Just to think like, I’m [00:07:00] gonna put my books in ku, or even, it doesn’t even have to be ku. It can just be, I’m gonna put my books on retailers and I’m gonna sell the ebook, or I’m gonna sell the paper back. But when you think about subscriptions, it’s a little bit different because at one, it happens on a monthly basis.
[00:07:15] Emilia Rose: So you’re not selling just one copy of something you’re selling. Months of access to your work And that’s like another aspect. It depends on what model you’re using. But I, I’m most familiar with like the early access model, so I’ll speak on that. you’re not selling the chapters, you’re selling access to view the chapters for that specific month.
[00:07:35] Emilia Rose: Mm. So it’s a lot different than saying like, Hey, I’m going to sell you one book. It’s like, No, I’m gonna sell you access to one book. You don’t own the book but I’m gonna sell you access to these chapters that I release every week. And you have to buy a month at a time so it’s a lot different than selling like an actual a one time thing cuz it has to happen recurringly.
[00:07:57] Emilia Rose: I don’t wanna say you constantly have to keep up with it and [00:08:00] constantly have to sell it, but. If people are in your community, they’re most likely people don’t want to or probably won’t continue to support if you’re not providing anything, Like you’re not giving them access to anything, if that makes sense.
[00:08:15] Michael Evans: Yeah, no, it totally makes sense. You know, there’s this book that I’m reading now and that we’re actually reading together in the Subscriptions for Authors Facebook group, which, if you’re not a part of the Facebook group, you should join it because we’re doing a book club this month and we’re focusing on books that help authors grow our subscription, or just be better authors who are cultivating super fans and building our own CUNY in general.
[00:08:39] Michael Evans: So not every book’s focused on subscriptions, but this month is, it’s called Subscription Marketing by Anzo. Written a number of nonfiction books for authors, but this specific book is actually nonfiction book that’s about subscriptions in general, anyone who wants to start a subscription business. So you could be a creator who’s not writing stories, you might be creating [00:09:00] videos, but also you instead might be a business that’s like selling meat in the mail.
[00:09:07] Michael Evans: Me and Emilia actually talked to a guy recently who does that sounds weird, but it’s actually a really cool business so all these business can, can help be helped by subscriptions. And she was saying like the number one thing about the subscription mindset is instead of focusing on selling the next book and acquiring your next customer, You actually will get more value in being able to nurture relationships with your existing customers.
[00:09:32] Michael Evans: And the subscription mindset is just simply doing that. You don’t have to have a subscription. Having a subscription makes it so that that kind of behavior is embedded into your business model. You become incentivized to do that. A reader to you, if they’re paying $5 a month is now worth $60 over the course of a year.
[00:09:50] Michael Evans: If you get them to continue enjoying that relationship. But that’s, that’s difficult.
[00:09:56] Michael Evans: And I think that brings us on to our third [00:10:00] step, which is, okay, we’re in that mindset. This seems like a good thing. I wanna nurture relationship with my readers, but what should I offer as my subscription rewards are value?
[00:10:10] Michael Evans: Like what should I actually be doing to nurture that relationship?
[00:10:13] Emilia Rose: There’s like a debate and it’s been in our Facebook group too, like, what should I do early access or exclusive content? And honestly, it depends on your reader. It depends on a lot of factors. It depends on your readers.
[00:10:25] Emilia Rose: It depends on where your readers are and their journey with you and how they’ve connected with you and how you’ve created that community. And also depends on where you are in your author journey. A lot of times it’s really hard to provide exclusive content to people if you don’t have the funds to provide it.
[00:10:44] Emilia Rose: So like artwork for example. You might have exclusive artwork on your subscription, but you have to pay artists. To create that art. Unless you’re doing something with ai, you have to pay the artists for that artwork. And you have to pay, usually it’s a [00:11:00] commercial fee too. And if you’re gonna print the artwork, you have to pay for printing and shipping and then you have to ship them out.
[00:11:05] Emilia Rose: And some people just don’t have the funds for it. And if you do, that’s great. If you don’t, you can still run a subscription. I prefer early access cuz it’s what I’ve built. And when I started, I was actually doing a little bit of exclusive content, but I found it wasn’t as valuable for me.
[00:11:22] Emilia Rose: I found that I could use that content elsewhere and make more money off of it instead of just like keeping it like sheltered on my subscription . I prefer the early access model because you get paid for writing books that your readers want to read and you want to write and you don’t get paid afterwards.
[00:11:38] Emilia Rose: You get paid while you’re writing them.
[00:11:40] Michael Evans: The model sounds, sounds great. And I think especially for authors who are in serial fiction, kind of my telephone pole view of seeing a lot of authors who are doing very well in subscriptions, it seems like that is probably the most prevalent model of people who are at the upper tier like you who are six figures [00:12:00] and up per year in descriptions.
[00:12:01] Michael Evans: People even like who are well beyond six figures, , he might be hitting seven figures, honestly, which is amazing. Like it just shows you that’s so amazing, the power in this kind of. Yeah, but he’s definitely, you know, he’s offering early access. That’s what’s driving most of his tears. But it also should be noted that he grew his readers, like where that relationship began, started on Royal Road of serial fiction platform.
[00:12:23] Michael Evans: Now he has a lot of readers coming in through retailers, specifically Amazon. So I’d be super curious to see, and I don’t even know if he knows this, but what is your average conversion to your subscription being like, that’s the end of the like reader journey, being on your subscription from someone who enters and discovers you through Royal Road versus someone who enters and discovers you through Amazon Can Unlimited or audible.
[00:12:46] Michael Evans: I don’t know that data, but I’d be fascinated to hear it.
[00:12:50] Emilia Rose: I don’t know it either. I would bet. I don’t know if that’s a strong word bet, but we’ll say, I would bet that the conversion rate from Royal Road is higher [00:13:00] because, He’s updating the, book chapter by chapter, and he’s like building that readership over an extended period of time compared to like somebody who read a book in KU and could binge read it in like one night.
[00:13:12] Emilia Rose: Not saying like his books are huge though, maybe not one night, but he’s, it’s just like a one time thing in ku compared to many, many months of updating a story in Royal Road where you’re building that relationship. So, I don’t know. I don’t have that data either for me personally, but that’s would be my best guess.
[00:13:31] Michael Evans: Yeah, it’s very interesting. I would agree with you. That would be my hunch as well. And it, it’s something to note for us as authors because, you know, not. Subgenres have at the moment a readership that’s very easily accessible through serial fiction platforms. Most do romance is plenty serial fiction app platforms on my own genre like science fiction, post apo fillers.
[00:13:53] Michael Evans: It’s actually difficult to, for me, I’ve really deeply searched into it to try and figure out what’s your old fiction [00:14:00] platform? Can I post on, I think my YA stuff could probably do well on wpa and there’s definitely an audience there for that, especially the YA dystopian especially the, the ones that have romance subplots, which mine do.
[00:14:13] Michael Evans: But it, it is difficult. And we also created a free guide for you to see a list of all the top serial fiction sites and the genres that typically do well in these sites, just so that if you’re interested in serializing one of your books, you’re able to see where you might be able to get it discovered. So go check that out.
[00:14:30] Michael Evans: Link is in the description. So I think for authors who may have an existing readership that was acquired through a retailer through that kind of, I’m gonna read your book all at once Relationship and also authors who may just be getting started, but maybe thinking it might be harder for me to find readers through serial fiction channels.
[00:14:49] Michael Evans: I think it’s interesting, we’re still early days in seeing subscriptions, but it might take a little bit longer to specifically find your messaging and what’s going to work because serial [00:15:00] fiction readers on Royal Road, it’s almost become standard that authors have a subscription for early access.
[00:15:05] Michael Evans: So Royal Road readers expect it, and I think that it’s a great model for readers and authors. But that behavior hasn’t been perpetuated to that level in not yet other areas of the publishing ecosystem. Not yet. That’s the key word. So yeah, a lot of us might be early trying to, to build these models, and I just think it’s worth noting that because people will find readers have varying familiarities of things.
[00:15:30] Michael Evans: I agree for early access obviously makes like the most sense. It’s an author like for us like to be like, Okay, we’re just posting our book here early. But I also think there’s other things that you can do that are unrelated to early access or exclusive access. Mm-hmm. . And I think these things really rely on you.
[00:15:47] Michael Evans: Again, having a deep relationship with your readers, This isn’t probably the first place someone’s gonna discover and buy something from you, but we see people like K Webster has her very high priced tiers of [00:16:00] hundred dollars plus per month that readers are paying, Her individual readers are paying a hundred dollars a month to be there and are like loving it because they’re getting access to discounts in her physical bookstore, they’re getting books mailed to them, they’re getting special rewards.
[00:16:15] Michael Evans: It’s like a lot of really interesting stuff. And she’s basically curated. A mini amusement park for these people. Like, they get to be part of like a, the K Webster theme park each month, and it’s like going to Disney, right? Like that kind of experience. And I think it’s worthwhile thinking about you know, if Disney wants their movies in every movie theater, you probably want your stories everywhere.
[00:16:37] Michael Evans: Readers can get them. But when you bring someone into your subscription, what kinds of experiences can you give them that look a bit more like Disney’s theme parks? That might sound weird, but if you can pull it off, Disney makes about 33% of their revenue from their theme parks. You know, disregarding during the Covid times.
[00:16:54] Michael Evans: However, during Covid, people were making a lot of money and subscriptions as authors [00:17:00] because we’re doing this virtually and don’t need to have physical amusement parks. So that’s how, like I think about it too, sometimes it’s about building a world around your readers rather than thinking about just early access or exclusive.
[00:17:12] Emilia Rose: Kind of going off that some people don’t want to read your book or like through chapter by chapter. Some people want the full book at a time, but some people also might want to subscribe for audio books or physical books in the mail or stickers. So it’s really trying to like test things and constantly tweaking your subscription.
[00:17:34] Emilia Rose: I’m always tweaking mine. We’re gonna
[00:17:35] Michael Evans: get to that more later as well. Yeah, that’s one of our future steps. So a little bit of a a teaser on that.
[00:17:41] Michael Evans: And I think this moves us perfectly into step four, which is, Let’s pretend we, we know our rewards now, and I wish that, like we could have given y’all a clear cut answer.
[00:17:51] Michael Evans: But the beautiful part about subscriptions is that it takes a little bit more upfront thought than being like, Oh, I’m just gonna post a book to Amazon. But the [00:18:00] great part about it is that you can generate this monthly recurring revenue that’s sustainable, that gives you direct connection to your customers that Amazon can’t cut off any day.
[00:18:08] Michael Evans: That you don’t have to play an algorithm to try and do that. You just have to serve your readers. That sounds nice, but now we have to think about how do we price these things? Because subscriptions don’t have the more standard pricing rates of eBooks still eBooks. It takes some thought to figure out how you wanna price it.
[00:18:23] Michael Evans: There’s a lot of strategies there. We’re not going into that. We’re going into subscription pricing strategies. So for you, Emilia, how do you price your subscription? But more importantly, what do you think we should be thinking about when deciding what price for our subscription?
[00:18:37] Emilia Rose: Yeah. So I’ll start with the first question.
[00:18:40] Emilia Rose: When I first started, I actually had two subscriptions. One was under my real name for my other writing, and one was under Emilia Rose. And for my other writing, I had a tier that was a $1 tier. Do not recommend. I would definitely, if you’re starting a subscription, I would recommend starting at $5 a month.
[00:18:58] Emilia Rose: And that’s just [00:19:00] me. From what I’ve learned, I feel like $1 a month sounds really nice to you as the author who has, who’s providing this content. And you’re like, Wow, I can entice so many people to pay $1 a month, but it’s going to, one, it might burn you out for, you’re providing all this access and you’re only getting $1 per reader.
[00:19:20] Emilia Rose: And even less than that because you have platform fees and yeah, a bunch of fees associated with that. But also people don’t really value, I mean, like some people do, but not everyone values something that’s $1. They might look at that and be like, Oh, it’s only a dollar. Like what is it going to really get me?
[00:19:37] Emilia Rose: How good is the quality going to be? So when I started my Emilia Rose subscription, I started at $3. It became a lot more successful than my first one. So I write would recommend starting there. But I would also, when thinking about how to price your tiers, look at what you’re offering. You obviously don’t want to offer something that’s more expensive than what your tier actually is.[00:20:00]
[00:20:00] Emilia Rose: And I would also recommend like under promising and then. Oh my gosh, I forgot the phrase.
[00:20:07] Michael Evans: Over delivering over . Under promise,
[00:20:10] Emilia Rose: Over deliver. Yes, Under promise. And over deliver all of your content. That’s my tips.
[00:20:15] Michael Evans: I think that’s great insights. You know, one thing about the $1 tier also as well, when people talk about platform fees, I think we all know that on Amazon, when you have a 99 cent book, that the, I think the royalty rate’s only 35%, or is it It’s 30% or 35.
[00:20:31] Michael Evans: I’m forgetting, and I don’t know why. I think it’s 35.
[00:20:33] Emilia Rose: It’s one of them. Yeah, it’s one of
[00:20:34] Michael Evans: them. Yeah. It’s low. It’s low, it’s low. It’s not, it’s, And people question why, and I think a common thing is just, Oh, they wanna incentivize people to have higher priced books and, and yeah, that it’s definitely true.
[00:20:46] Michael Evans: Also a major reason is that credit card companies and banks, when they process our transactions, have like a minimum fee of like 30 to 35 cents, typically no matter what the size of the transaction is. Therefore, when a [00:21:00] dollar goes from your reader’s bank account to your bank account, at least it’ll eventually make its journey there that has about like 35 cents that are just being gone to financial institutions in the middle of it, which is, it’s kind of ridiculous.
[00:21:13] Michael Evans: It’s sad in my opinion, that those sorts of micro-transactions aren’t more accessible. That’s a whole conversation for another day in terms of how that statistics work. But all you need to know is that a dollar, a lot of that money does end up not going into your pocket. You’re not actually getting close to a dollar, and there’s not many ways around that unfortunately.
[00:21:35] Michael Evans: Now, I think a dollar. Thinking about that though, there are reasons to do a dollar tier. Michael Chatfield on a prior podcast that we had mentioned that his dollar tier is for basically donations and people who can’t afford maybe a $5 tier one month but still wanna be a part of the subscription, it’s much easier to get someone to change their price They’re paying rather than unsubscribe and resubscribe.
[00:21:58] Michael Evans: So that can be a benefit to it. And he [00:22:00] basically just says like, Thank you. Like there’s not, it’s like a tip jar. There’s not much else that you get for that, but that’s, I found an interesting use of a dollar tier. And it’s interesting cuz $3, you can start at, I’ve seen authors who have, you know, just early access, a couple chapters a month for $5, some have it more, and these are early access for, you know, eBooks or not offering like early access to serialized audio or anything like that.
[00:22:23] Michael Evans: So it definitely depends. My, my advice when thinking about pricing is, Think about what kind of maybe value you’re providing them. So at like these really high priced tiers, like if you’re going for like 25, 40, 50, even a hundred plus, you’re giving them like this incredible special experience, whatever that is.
[00:22:45] Michael Evans: So that to me, you get into like the theme park mindset. Yeah. And now we’re thinking about, you know, how are you giving them something each month that they’re gonna be like, Wow. And that might be something that’s as simple as, if you are my [00:23:00] hundred dollars tier, you get input into my next story. Or your like, name is the name of the main character.
[00:23:05] Michael Evans: I don’t know. Your readers may hate that, They may not like that, or they may love it. We’ll talk about that in terms of figuring out what your readers like shortly. But I think if you’re at a lower price tier, let’s say anything from like three to $10 a month, maybe even a bit higher, That you can kind of think about it more like coffee, right?
[00:23:26] Michael Evans: That’s still an impulse purchase. It’s something that’s nice. It’s good, it brings something nice to your life, but it doesn’t have to be like a nice dinner out. It’s like the expectation changes. Like at a few dollars to even $10, you could be going to a coffee shop. You can be getting even ice cream nowadays as close to that price.
[00:23:42] Michael Evans: But I think that it’s tough to know the pricing difference between five to $10 without doing some testing, which we’ll talk about.
[00:23:51] Michael Evans: Yeah. But before we get to testing and how you can think about, Hmm, how can I change my price? Just like you would do on an ebook. We have to think about where we host [00:24:00] our subscription, the tech that we need to make it happen. Because it would be great if your readers can just send you $5 a month by passenger pigeon and your stories, I don’t know, just appear magically in their library, but it doesn’t work like that.
[00:24:15] Michael Evans: So, Emilia, I’m curious what you use to run your subscription and what advice you’d give to authors, maybe some of the problems in pitfalls that you have and how you can avoid them.
[00:24:23] Emilia Rose: when I opened my subscription, I started on Patreon. It’s a decent platform, but it has a lot of pitfalls, at least for me as an author that I’ve found over the years.
[00:24:32] Emilia Rose: And the authors that we’ve spoken to on the podcast or separately to have had some problems with Patreon. But that is one of the big platforms at the moment. Just for subscriptions in general. So Patreon is a place where all creators can host their subscriptions, but it’s really not specific for fiction authors.
[00:24:50] Michael Evans: I think Patreon’s definitely a common platform and some other ones that we’ve heard authors use and that I’ve interacted actually with subscriptions on these platforms myself are sub stack [00:25:00] cofi.
[00:25:00] Michael Evans: buy me coffee. Those are all platforms that you could either do like crowdfunding slash fan direct payments in. Mm-hmm. and sub stacks. One that’s actually specifically designed for journalists and newsletter writers.
[00:25:11] Michael Evans: But I think some things are missing on all these platforms that made me never consider setting up a subscription, like for years. And I think now, like every author’s talking about setting up subscription, which is great, but the things that I always found difficult were that Patreon doesn’t really have an ability to upload native eBooks.
[00:25:31] Michael Evans: Yeah. Or to read eBooks natively on the platform. Sub stack doesn’t have that ability either. Sub stack finally came out with an e-reader after five years of being a company, , but it’s. It’s still not an e-reader for books. It’s an eReader like medium is, It’s like going to the medium blogging site. Mm-hmm.
[00:25:48] Michael Evans: And another thing that I found difficult was that Patreon gave me very little guidance on what fellow authors in my genre were doing, and made it very difficult to see fellow authors in my genre if [00:26:00] any of them existed. Whereas a platform like Subst Stack, I’m able to find fellow authors, but none of them are in my genre.
[00:26:08] Michael Evans: They all are nonfiction. And another problem I had was that on a platform like Subst Stack, they don’t have the ability to create tiers that easily. They don’t have a good pricing page like paton’s pricing page yet Patriot’s pricing page isn’t custom built for an author. So you end up scrolling down and readers see like, how many videos do, am I gonna unlock?
[00:26:25] Michael Evans: How many posts? And I don’t think readers care about posts and videos. They care about chapters, stories and the awesome things you’re giving them as an author. So those are just things that, like I’ve observed about both platforms without even like, going to set up a subscription that made me scared, that made me think, this is not for authors that made me think I’m just not gonna do it.
[00:26:43] Emilia Rose: You have to, at least on the platforms that there are out and available to use now you have to really get creative with how you send your material and your rewards to your readers. Especially if you’re hosting like eBooks or early access, or just chapters or nad there’s nothing [00:27:00] really directly made that’s, that’s available for authors.
[00:27:04] Michael Evans: I think that’s definitely true and that’s actually why we wanted to create Reem. A lot of you probably listening all know about it. And with Reem, it’s really a platform built for you to streamline the time that it takes you to run your subscription and make it easy for both you and your readers to have fun, get the stories they love and
[00:27:26] Michael Evans: and connect as authors and readers. How we do that is through three main things, although there’s a lot of other little features and bells and whistles that we’re also excited about. The three main things are a publishing scheduler that makes it really easy to automatically deliver chapters, either through exclusive content or early access that update to your readers.
[00:27:47] Michael Evans: They get automatically notified and you could schedule these chapters in seconds so you don’t have to spend, you know, hours a month trying to schedule posts, a different tiers on a platform like Patreon or [00:28:00] SubT. Another thing that we have is a community all in one with your stories and your e-readers, that readers can be able to not only comment within your stories, but you as an author have the ability to make posts, updates to your readers, exclusive cover art, anything you’d like in kind of like a mini Facebook group that sits on the platform.
[00:28:18] Michael Evans: And the third thing we give you as an author is the ability like truly sell direct to your audience. So you have the ability to download all of their emails to a csv. You can mute readers when they’re not being maybe super cordial in your community.
[00:28:32] Michael Evans: And another awesome feature that we have is that you can message your readers directly when they sign up to your subscription, write on your dashboard. It doesn’t take much time at all to be able to be like, Hey, thanks for coming here. So that’s kind of some of the things that we do and we’re hoping to do even more things in the future.
[00:28:48] Michael Evans: And if you’re interested in that, you can definitely sign up. For our beta and the link below, we are planning to launch late, late 2022, like holidays or [00:29:00] very early 2023. And, we’ll be doing a closed beta at first, so we’ll only be letting a few people on making sure the platform goes well.
[00:29:08] Michael Evans: So if you wanna be one of those people and get your invite sign up below . The people on the launch list that you can sign up
[00:29:15] Michael Evans: For at ream dot i k, that’s the website name Ream with dot i k Ream dot Inc. It’s linked down the description below so you can’t miss it.
[00:29:26] Michael Evans: So if you want to be one of the first people to be on the Ream platform, then signing up below ensures that that can happen, cuz we’ll be rolling out invites to the wait list and letting people on the platform all throughout winter 2023 into Spring 2023 as we scale up our team and make sure that we can serve every single author on our platform and make you and your readers very happy. But I also wanna mention that there’s other tools out there that you can use for subscriptions and selling direct. So Book Funnel is not a platform that enables you to monetize subscriptions, but it can be very [00:30:00] helpful when sending files to readers, when sending arcs and things like that.
[00:30:04] Michael Evans: They have a ton of features and Book Funnel is a platform that was built by Andy authors for Andie authors. So there’s a lot of cool things you can do there, even though you couldn’t run your subscription there. It can be helpful. It can be helpful if you’re using other platforms or even a platform like Reem, you’d be able.
[00:30:20] Michael Evans: Use book funnel and tandem with it. You could also run a subscription on your own website. There’s ws that you can use that you can do subscriptions through. I believe you can do it through Squarespace as well. There’s plugins through WordPress. These can be sometimes amazing, like Jason osba and Nick Cole have their own membership on their site.
[00:30:39] Michael Evans: That goes really well, but sometimes it can be difficult. So that’s just your preference and what you wanna do with your subscription, but you could also have it on your own site. And other tools that could be useful are there’s platforms like Circle Mighty Networks and Geneva. If you’re not into Facebook groups or Discord, [00:31:00] those are platforms that you can host your community on and communicate with your reader.
[00:31:02] Michael Evans: And actually get their emails, have a direct connection to them without interfacing through Facebook or Discord. Obviously you could use Facebook at Discord too. And I would say most people who are on Patreon and sub Stacks still end up using a Discord or Facebook group or something like that.
[00:31:18] Michael Evans: And obviously on Ream, we make it so that if you’d like to, you can have all the communities in one place. But we also recognize like Geneva’s a great platform for some people. Circle can be, readers are oftentimes on Facebook. So those are all options. I know that’s a lot, but I think that’s kind of the low down of where you could look at for your tech stack or mm-hmm.
[00:31:38] Michael Evans: thinking about how you would run your subscription.
[00:31:40] Michael Evans: Once you know the technology that you’re gonna use to host your subscription, the next thing is promoting it. So yes. How do you promote your subscription and what would be your advice for authors who are trying to get the readers to discover that?
[00:31:53] Michael Evans: Like, Hey, you can, you can pay me monthly.
[00:31:55] Emilia Rose: Yeah, so I promote my subscription in a couple of different ways. The main way that [00:32:00] I promote it is through serial websites. I use wpa at the end of every chapter that I upload, which is completely free, people read for free on there.
[00:32:08] Emilia Rose: I just tell everyone that they can get early access to like 20 or 40 more chapters of the same story if they join my subscription. And I say that usually after every single chapter I post and I post them. I periodically, so like maybe twice a week. So people are constantly seeing that message over and over again.
[00:32:30] Emilia Rose: And if the cliff hanger is good enough and people really wanna continue the story and read it, a lot of people jump over and read on my subscription. And I also do the same kind of model or I’ve tested this model out Through my newsletter basically sharing a free chapter at the end of the newsletter to certain readers, like segmented out and saying like, Hey, press this, press this button.
[00:32:52] Emilia Rose: And you could read more chapters. Like, who doesn’t wanna read more chapters? And so those are the ways I promote my subscription. Right now, [00:33:00] what I’ve found that doesn’t work for me specifically is trying to promote it to people who haven’t even been in like my world yet, and read any of my stories.
[00:33:09] Emilia Rose: Like a lot of times at least people have given me the idea like, Hey, why don’t you like go into my reader group and promote your subscription? And I’m just like, That’s not really what I wanna do, because chances are they’re not gonna convert. So like they’re gonna see like, Oh, hey, this is $5 per month for the lowest tier.
[00:33:27] Emilia Rose: Why would I pay $5 a month when I could go on KU and read a different book, four $5 a month. I could read a bunch of books for $5 a month. I really wanna hook them into my world first, and then from there start building that relationship with the reader and then try to upsell them into a subscription.
[00:33:44] Emilia Rose: So that’s what I found works. It doesn’t work.
[00:33:47] Michael Evans: No, I think that’s great. It’s really the mindset of selling direct too. Realizing that you can, continuing to build a relationship with your readers that can be fostered over time so that you’re not, you’re not selling them day [00:34:00] one. Like, you know, here’s my a hundred dollars here, you know, I know you just met me, but you’re gonna like this.
[00:34:05] Michael Evans: You gotta build that trust with them. It all goes back to that. And I also think that as well, there’s also a degree of not only trust, but urgency you have to create. And yeah, I think there’s a few interesting ways you can do this when you’re first getting your subscription started. Something that I personally recommend, cuz I think it’s great to give anything, a launch bonus is say here’s like a limited tier that I’m gonna give the first 10, 20, 50, a hundred people.
[00:34:29] Michael Evans: You could pick the number, maybe you call it a founding reader that’s super generic brand that for you. But I think the point is that you give people this idea of I’m first, I’m literally first. I’m always gonna be first and people will know it and unless they unsubscribe, but that, that makes ’em wanna say even more, right?
[00:34:46] Michael Evans: And then they get to be a part of this first iteration of it. And maybe it’s not, you know, perfect yet. Maybe they’re like, I don’t know if I love what this author’s offering me yet, but I love [00:35:00] the idea that I could be the first to support them. And I love the idea that I could be the first in this little fan club.
[00:35:04] Michael Evans: Like you can literally join the fan club first. So I think that could be a good way to kind of start and try and figure things out when it comes from promoting. And another thing that I recommend is trying to really hone in on what’s going to make someone psychologically think, I need this now. Because when they say I need this is when they’ll subscribe.
[00:35:26] Michael Evans: There’s always that rule of like seven times you have to see something before you actually buy it. But I don’t think that’s actually true. I think someone buys something when they say they need it. If you need toilet paper, you see it once and you’re gonna buy it. Right. So that’s obviously one of those things that you know, authors don’t create toilet paper, but that’s okay.
[00:35:44] Michael Evans: That’s totally fine. , we are in a much more exciting and fun business where you can create needs from your stories that people need more of. And I think the most basic way to do that is to give someone a little bit of your story and then be like, Yeah, cliff hanger, it [00:36:00] continues here. And, and yeah, that can be like, Annoying to reader, but especially if you tell, I’m like, you know, it’s it, you can get it here.
[00:36:07] Michael Evans: Like this is my work. You have to pay for it anyways. You just got three chapters for free. Yeah. And now the rest of it is on the description. That’s a good way to maybe get them in. And other things you can think about doing are like, especially if you’re doing exclusive content, Oh maybe they’re cover your cover’s revealed there and they really wanna see that like maybe special edition of the cover.
[00:36:28] Michael Evans: Maybe you came out with a little side story for a character that you wrote that can be just a way to get someone in. This isn’t what’s gonna get them to continues describing over the course of a year, but that’s what will get them in to be like, Oh, okay, I’m ready to pay a couple dollars first month and try it out.
[00:36:44] Michael Evans: And then it’s your job to make sure they like it, which actually I think goes on to.
[00:36:49] Michael Evans: Our next point, which is how do you manage your subscription? Part of that is things like posting frequency. Part of that is just how do you get readers [00:37:00] to stay?
[00:37:00] Emilia Rose: Yeah, that’s a really good question. And I think it just all depends on how you’ve set up your subscription.
[00:37:07] Emilia Rose: So if you’ve set it up in a way that you provide exclusive content, I think it’s going to take a lot more time on your end. And a lot more project management. So say for example, you are providing artwork, so exclusive artwork just for your subscription or just for your subscribers, you now have to not only pay for that art artwork to be done, you have to find an artist that you like.
[00:37:32] Emilia Rose: You have to find an artist who does really good work and then you have to wait for them to do the arts. You have to like do contracts and all this stuff, and then you have to like, Print it out if you’re gonna print the artwork. And it just becomes, at least for me, I’m delving into this though, which is why I, I’m doing kind of exclusive and early access right now.
[00:37:52] Emilia Rose: But it becomes a lot of work. And I mean, if you’re gonna get paid, you have to work for it sometimes too, [00:38:00] But it becomes a lot more work than I think early access is. Because early access, you’re just writing the chapter like you, you were going to do, but now you’re just publishing the chapter early, one chapter at a time.
[00:38:13] Emilia Rose: So for me, early access, if I had just, if I had just continued to focus on early access and not branched out like I have it would probably take me an extra 20 minutes a week to run my subscription and that’s it. But now that I have a bunch of like, projects going on that are kind of exclusive stuff, it’s taking me a.
[00:38:34] Emilia Rose: At least a few, a few more hours than just 20 minutes. So it depends on how your subscription is set up and what you’re offering,
[00:38:42] Michael Evans: The biggest advice I can give is not to offer everything from day one. You don’t need to set up eight separate tiers.
[00:38:48] Michael Evans: You can have one tier. Mm-hmm. , you can have two tiers. You can start with five tiers. But like, that means you have to provide things for all of that. And of course your rewards build, like someone who’s in your [00:39:00] $25 month tier, for instance, you can choose to give them access to all of the wars that you would get on your $5 tier and your $10 tier, which is pretty standard practice.
[00:39:07] Michael Evans: You don’t have to do that, but it’s standard practice. However, that still means you have to give something extra to that $25 tier. And eventually it’s like, well, you’ve done the early access thing. You might even be writing exclusive short story amount. What else are you gonna give someone? And there is lots of ideas.
[00:39:21] Michael Evans: I mean, you could be doing candles, you could be doing things like travel guides. You could be doing recipes based off your world. I mean, anything that you think your readers be interested, there’s like limitless ideas that could even just be digital. You don’t have to spend your time shipping, but still takes time to do these things, Especially commissioning art.
[00:39:40] Michael Evans: You don’t have to send out physical art if you don’t want to. Yeah. But digital art, like she was saying, bookmarks even like that’s something that is low cost, but you still have to print them and ship ’em out. So anyways, that’s just all the downsides that, you can get yourself into. But it can be a great thing because if you have a lot of readers who want it and who are coming back for it, [00:40:00] that’s exciting.
[00:40:00] Michael Evans: But you almost like you need to play the line carefully between what do I need to do to keep creating more demand and is. Simply setting up the ability to have bookmarks and creating more and more art and more and more exclusive content, going to create more demand for it because you already have a huge demand for exclusive content, then that’s a, a great place to be in.
[00:40:21] Michael Evans: Mm-hmm. , then you can sell that. But if you don’t have demand for it, I’m not sure that’s the lever to pull on to create more demand. Like I don’t think writing more exclusive content that only ever exists in subscription is going to convince more people to realize what they’re missing out on. So these are just all things to think about in that.
[00:40:36] Michael Evans: But the biggest thing I think that we’re about to get to is iterating your subscription, Step eight, which I think ties into part two of our question of how do I get people to stay and how do I give people more of what they want? How do I know what they want in my subscription? So I wanna ask you, how do you get to learn about your readers, and when you got to set up these new tiers, now that you’re doing more than just early access, [00:41:00] what made you do this?
[00:41:01] Michael Evans: What made you realize. My readers want this.
[00:41:03] Emilia Rose: Oh, well, , Well, sometimes I do things impulsively, so I don’t know if that’s a good question to ask. We but I’ll, I’ll give you the answer anyway. So the reason I’ve made these extra tiers is because I want to expand my IP as far as it will go. So I want to create worlds around my stories, and I just don’t want them to be eBooks.
[00:41:23] Emilia Rose: I don’t want them to just be paperbacks. I want them to be in audio form, audio dramas graphic novels, anywhere I can get them to be, I want them to be. And so a lot of the times I have planned to do these projects anyway but they do like drawing a graphic novel takes a long time. So how am I going to make that money back that I’m like constantly like paying my artist?
[00:41:47] Emilia Rose: And the way I’ve done that is. Added another tier on my subscription and said, Hey, you can read one chapter, this graphic novel a month for 15 extra dollars, [00:42:00] and my lowest tier right now, or my, the tier they were previously in. I’m already producing this content, but I can’t make it available anywhere else yet, so I’m going to test it out on my subscription.
[00:42:12] Emilia Rose: So that’s what I’ve done. Just as I add tiers, what projects in my I person do I personally wanna work on? That’s a big thing, like if you don’t wanna work on a project, you shouldn’t add it to your subscription. You’re gonna hate yourself after a while. But, so make it, make sure it’s a project you wanna work on.
[00:42:32] Emilia Rose: But also you want to at least know that some of your people who are your super fans want that project as well, which I do a lot of polls on my subscription. So a lot of people wanted this specific story to be a graphic novel, so that’s what I did. I chose this specific story to be the graphic novel.
[00:42:49] Emilia Rose: But over time, like I launched this tier in July, I think. But since then I’ve made changes to it and I plan to change it even more. Come [00:43:00] 2023. And a lot of this is just providing more content, again, providing more content to them that I’ve already planned to do as well as try to get people from lower tiers into higher tiers.
[00:43:15] Emilia Rose: So a lot of that is through polls pulling my readers and of readers of all tiers and asking them, Hey, what do you want through the subscription and seeing what they want. And if they want a sticker a month, then I’m going to put a sticker a month in my third highest tier or something like that. So
[00:43:35] Michael Evans: I’m just curious, what have your readers responded to these polls with?
[00:43:39] Michael Evans: What are some of the recurring responses?
[00:43:40] Emilia Rose: Oh, people want me to do book boxes so badly and they, So I’m going to probably launch book boxes in 2023 in a high tier in my $50 tier. And it’s just gonna be sending out one book with some like merch stuff. So, but that’s like the, the most [00:44:00] in demand thing right now.
[00:44:01] Michael Evans: That’s fascinating. That kind of goes along with. Like this idea of like your Disney, like experience, like a book box. Yeah. Getting that in the mail. Having these things like custom made each month, like in terms of maybe a sticker, maybe a, a piece of art that’s depicting a character in the book.
[00:44:17] Michael Evans: Maybe it’s a, a cap that you put in, or it’s,
[00:44:20] Emilia Rose: it can also be parallel products as well.
[00:44:24] Michael Evans: What you’re describing makes me excited because it’s like you’re actually like funding, you’re doing your customer testing and funding these parallel product lines up front that you then can bring out of your subscription.
[00:44:35] Michael Evans: Still charge for in your subscription, but then charge for it elsewhere. Mm-hmm. and then more readers can find you through these things.
[00:44:41] Emilia Rose: I’ve actually just created a calendar and a journal for one of my series in Lulu,. And it turned out really good.
[00:44:49] Emilia Rose: I mean, I only got the journal in the mail yet, but it turned out really good. So Wow. Something it’s go, that’s gonna be offered somewhere.
[00:44:58] Michael Evans: Yeah. No, that’s, that’s [00:45:00] amazing. And that’s how you get to have, you know, instead of thinking about one reader and how many books can I sell, one reader, one super fan, it’s like you can create an entire world of products and apparel around them.
[00:45:16] Michael Evans: Mm-hmm. . And you just increase the lifetime value of your super fans by like five or six x. So then you can just be like, okay. I wanna have more of these people, then you could just spend more money marketing your books or do more interesting things to get more people to read your books. And you know, a certain percentage of them are gonna become super fans.
[00:45:32] Michael Evans: And now, like your real business is just in all of these incredible things you get to do for them. And then doing these incredible things makes them love you more and tell more of their friends. And that also brings in more fans, some of which will eventually come to your fan. So it’s just like this flywheel that never ends.
[00:45:46] Michael Evans: Yeah. Because like you’re doing these exciting things. So I love it. It’s inspiration and yeah, to keep it simple. The takeaway here is like, just pull your readers, talk to them and make changes based on what they say. Yes. Awesome.
[00:45:59] Michael Evans: [00:46:00] And this brings us to our ninth point or step nine. And going from zero to a hundred thousand descriptions, which is where we actually, this is where we actually start to think about how we can go from starting a description.
[00:46:11] Michael Evans: Now we’re making some money to now making like six figures a year. So I’m, I’m curious for you what your experience has been like in, in scaling your description and what would be your advice for someone who sees that they’re starting to get a few fans who are really liking this, but wants to get more fans in, wants to grow this revenue stream to become something really significant?
[00:46:30] Emilia Rose: Yeah, this is a hard one. A big thing is just continuing to provide the access that you say you’re going to provide and building that trust always, because if you only have 10 subscribers and things come up in your life and you can’t provide as much content as you say you’re going to provide.
[00:46:52] Emilia Rose: It’s going to be a lot harder to scale. Because that trust between your first few super fans is kind of [00:47:00] tarnished and broken. So that’s why I recommend under promising. That’s probably what has, what I’ve been able to do to get to the place I am now in my
[00:47:12] Michael Evans: subscription.
[00:47:13] Michael Evans: That’s super interesting. It’s like you have to get over this like trust. Precipice like this, there’s this threshold of trust that once you cross, people start to see , this is a really cool place to be able to spend,, my money, but also even more importantly, my time each month by emotionally invested.
[00:47:29] Michael Evans: Mm-hmm. . But you have to kind of have that social proof there. And it’s not as easy to, for a subscription, especially to just like the number matters. Like, if you see one versus a thousand people in a subscription, you might trust it more because it’s like, Oh wow, a thousand people are already doing this.
[00:47:45] Michael Evans: That’s cool. But it’s not as simple as like, Oh, it has a thousand reviews on Amazon. So people like it. Like it’s not that simple because people have to think about, well, how do I fit into this really? What is this? So I saying is really helpful and interesting,[00:48:00] but ultimately my biggest advice, people who are looking to like scale up their subscription is, Figure out how to discover more readers and bring them on.
[00:48:11] Michael Evans: Like that reader journey that hits your subscription faster in ways that now at this point, hopefully you’ve already proven that readers like one or two things that they’re likely subscribe to in the beginning. So maybe that’s like an exclusive content early access. And to scale this up, you can start to say like, Okay, you know, every time someone hits my newsletter, I’m gonna send them this automation that’s going to tease the the latest story in my subscription, and a certain number of them will convert.
[00:48:39] Michael Evans: And then you just have to think about how can I get more quality newsletter subscribers, people who already have that relationship me enough, who trust me enough at least to give. Their email and then that’s a whole other conversation. How do you find those people? And I think for them it’s like the biggest way is getting ’em to read your books or read some of your stories.
[00:48:59] Michael Evans: And that’s [00:49:00] where the conversation gets real wild. Cuz it’s like, oh wow, how do you get someone to discover your books? And that’s a whole other podcast. But I think the authors who are going out and doing that and building these communities of their readers on social platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Facebook. And then bringing their audience off these platforms into their own subscription, maybe first their mailing list can be successful. And some of the same messaging and feeling that the people love in your subscription are the same messaging that you can use in the real world, except, you know, the call to action’s a bit different.
[00:49:32] Michael Evans: You know, you’re not immediately going like, Buy, buy my subscribe immediately. But you instead say like, I do these awesome things. My readers love this one image. What if I was to tease it a couple months later on my TikTok and do a page flip thing? Yeah. I don’t know. There’s a lot of different ways you can go about it.
[00:49:48] Emilia Rose: And kind of going off that, I have two points. One, we were talking about earlier . They might join somebody who has a thousand supporters compared to somebody who has 10 supporters. But I think [00:50:00] like if you, if you have 10 supporters, like you kind of have the upper hand, because like me personally, I can’t connect with my 2000 readers every single month.
[00:50:10] Emilia Rose: But 10 readers is so much more doable. And you could foster those relationships so much better, and you can really connect with your readers. And when you connect with those first 10 readers, it’s a lot easier for them to go out and tell their friends or go out and comment on Facebook posts about whose book you should read.
[00:50:29] Emilia Rose: So yeah, like you don’t like, feel like you can. Do a subscription if you only have 10 people, because it’s, I feel like when you’re at that point, it’s a lot easier to grow because you can foster those relationships so much easier. And then two, it’s not always a numbers game. Like you can scale up with having the same amount of people on your subscription by providing more either exclusive content or earlier and earlier access.
[00:50:55] Emilia Rose: And in those higher tiers, like you don’t have to grow from 10 [00:51:00] people to a thousand people and like think you’re going to make a lot more money when You can do the same thing going from 10 people to 10 people just in different tiers.
[00:51:09] Michael Evans: That’s unbelievably true. If you get those 10 people who are paying.
[00:51:14] Michael Evans: $5 a month to all of a sudden be paying you $50 a month, you’ve just 10 x your subscription revenue. Yeah. And especially if you’re able to keep that revenue high margin where it’s mainly focused on digital goods and things like that. Maybe you do an hour session with people, like an hour like book club that you get together and talk to readers, or maybe you do do something physical involved, shipping them a book or something like that, but you keep the costs relatively low where it’s like maybe only 20% of that.
[00:51:45] Michael Evans: Then now you’ve increased your actual profit by maybe eight times. You’re profiting now $40 a month instead of just $5 a month. That, that’s a, that’s a big difference. And at those higher tiers, as well, you will be able to foster so [00:52:00] much loyalty once you get someone there. So like it’s not an impulse purchase to be spending $50 a month.
[00:52:06] Michael Evans: So as long as you keep delivering on that and keep making them happy, it could be really interesting. And that’s why like there’s a lot of authors who are now beginning to, with a few dozen or even a hundred fans, be able to actually approach a very livable wage through subscriptions.
[00:52:21] Michael Evans: And they obviously have other income streams too, but that’s wild. Like you could start to think about instead of how do I get a thousand people to read my next book? Or 10,000 people, How do I get a hundred people to love something so much from me that they’ll just keep coming back each month? And obviously, you know, how much do you wanna make a month?
[00:52:39] Michael Evans: If you wanna make, you know, $5,000 a month from a hundred people that pay $50 a month, if you wanna make $8,000, pay you $80 a month, and that’s all doable. It’s just backing into what that takes. I think that your advice is amazing though,
[00:52:51] Michael Evans: And I think this gets into our last point, step 10. Which is really thinking about the long run, the long game of subscriptions, [00:53:00] that 10 year, maybe not plan, but that 10 year vision of how do you make this sustainable As an author, how do you make this something that a reader theoretically could stick with you for 10 years?
[00:53:12] Michael Evans: Obviously the answer’s very individual, but how do you think about it? You’ve been doing this for three years now, and I know you have no plans of stopping.
[00:53:19] Emilia Rose: It sounds like very simple and I feel like I’ve just been saying it like again and again, but just provide your readers what they want and don’t do anything you don’t want because you want this to be sustainable for you.
[00:53:33] Emilia Rose: And if you can’t provide 10 chapters a week of your book, don’t do it. It’s not going to work. You’re going to think like, this is way too much work. And I do never, like, I never wanna do subscriptions again. You have to find a balance and you need to know what you can realistically do and what you’re willing to do every single week or every single month for your subscribers.
[00:53:55] Emilia Rose: You also have to like take into account what they actually want and what they’re willing to [00:54:00] pay for month after month after month. So that’s what I’ve done , I know not, not anything like profound or interesting, but I would say just like keep it simple and just focus on those two things.
[00:54:12] Michael Evans: I agree. I think keeping it simple is always what works. You know, if a reader’s telling their friend. Why they should be a part of something, why they should be a part of the subscription specifically. They’re probably not gonna list 10 reasons. They’re probably gonna say one thing they’re really excited about.
[00:54:28] Michael Evans: Mm-hmm. , it’s part of the challenge, but part of the beauty is like figuring out that one thing. But once you figure out that one thing, if it’s something you enjoy and it, I really hope it is, and if it’s something you really enjoy and wanna give your readers, then just focusing on that one thing can make all the difference.
[00:54:44] Michael Evans: It really can. Mm-hmm. And when thinking about, the long run of what this can do for your business and why you should maybe consider this is over the course of 10 years, if you have built a relationship with your core fans [00:55:00] who’ve been paying you every month to be a part of. You’re now like part of their world in such an intimate way.
[00:55:08] Michael Evans: You’re like a friend. You’re almost like a family member to someone, even though you might not feel that way about them, like they’re gonna feel that way about you and you’re gonna have that direct connection to them literally through their email that enables you to be able to do these parallel product lines like Emilia’s talking about, to be able to branch out your IP into different modes and different mediums that enables you to get greater discovery.
[00:55:33] Michael Evans: And it’s getting that unbelievable data like very early on that isn’t like a number, but instead is like what someone’s telling you about your story and about your next idea that enables you to fine tune what you’re doing and not spend. A lot of money and a lot of time wasted away doing something that your readers don’t want.
[00:55:53] Michael Evans: Cuz you’re gonna be so much more in tune to your readers. Mm-hmm. . Cause you have that direct connection. And I think that’s why over the course of 10 [00:56:00] years, if you listen to your readers 10% better what can that do?
[00:56:05] Michael Evans: What if you work together with authors who are all trying to listen to their readers better and give them more awesome stories and more awesome experiences. Like I think that makes such an exciting world for readers. And ultimately if you can do that, it’s gonna make such a great world for us as authors.
[00:56:21] Emilia Rose: I love your comment about like family and friends because I know like, My first few supporters I connected with them a lot through Discord and honestly, I don’t have time to talk to people as much as I used to, like my readers because I’m doing so many, so much stuff.
[00:56:39] Emilia Rose: But I like still think about them. Sometimes I’ll just like be doing something and be like, Oh, I haven’t heard from her in a really long time, or I hope she’s doing well. And then like I’ll go and Discord and see a message from her and it will be just like, Wow, this is crazy. But I, yeah, like. At least I like connecting with people.
[00:56:58] Emilia Rose: So maybe that’s just a, this is just a [00:57:00] me thing, but those first few people who support you and who really, really support you, you’re not gonna forget them. Like, I haven’t, And like sometimes they’ll comment and be like, Oh wow, like you’ve grown so much. Like, I’m so happy for you. And I’m like, You, you were there from the beginning.
[00:57:15] Emilia Rose: Still like one of my really great friends. Like, don’t think I forgot about you basically. I’m still here and I still think about you too,
[00:57:21] Michael Evans: Stories bring us together and the walls that we create enable us to actually be together.
[00:57:26] Michael Evans: And yeah, a subscription can be a really big part of the world that you’re creating as an author and can enable you to have that foundation to know what you need to, create and build next. And I bet that if. If you are the big like media companies of, you know, yester year, they were the people that were able to, through brute force, be able to create more interesting experiences for lots of people.
[00:57:53] Michael Evans: But now we live in a world with creator economy where anyone can do it at a very small niche scale and really help [00:58:00] people who don’t feel heard elsewhere, feel heard in what you’re creating and doing for them. And that’s just like the coolest thing and it’s like happening now. We all get to be a part of this.
[00:58:11] Michael Evans: So, I mean, this was very inspiring, Amazing time talking with you and I hope everyone learned a lot. I definitely did. And I hope everyone has an amazing day and happy writing.