By Michael Evans on November 25, 2022.
Rituals are intentional, purposeful moments that ask us to engage with the world around us. They are active and participatory enabling you to forge a deeper connection with your readers.
Common rituals may be going to church, reciting the pledge of allegiance, or going to a club meeting. If you analyze the rituals in your life and the powerful institutions that have made rituals a core part of their strategy, you may realize that building rituals into your reader business could be a powerful way to supercharge your fandom. And the online world allows us to reimagine rituals for our readers.
Of course, there are a million different ways you can implement rituals to connect with your readers. Here at Subscriptions for Authors, we think rituals can be a powerful way to monetize your subscription. You can create a separate tier offering access to participate in certain rituals that your readers would be excited about. In addition, you could even limit the members of these tiers, that way they remain exclusive, manageable for you, and something that people are willing to pay a premium for.
And now for some concrete ideas about rituals you can implement for your subscription:
- A Community Newsletter: To lead this ritual, you as the author would ask your readers a question each week or month pending on your cadence. If you’re a nonfiction business author, maybe it’s a question about marketing strategies, and if you’re a fantasy author, maybe it’s about your favorite sword. Your readers will then respond to this prompt and it will be combined into a joint email that everyone will get to experience. If interested in doing something similar, I recommend using Letterloop.
- Calls with your Readers: This is as simple as it sounds. You pick a time that mutually works for you and your readers and have a chat with them (on Zoom or a similar service). Sci-fi author Christopher Hopper has created a VIP club for his readers that 30 people attend weekly and fostered incredible connections among his fans.
- A Monthly Role-Playing Game: Imagine if your readers could role-play as characters in your story asynchronously. How it works: assign readers in your tier roles that correspond to characters in your world. Give them an inciting incident or some ground rules and then have them kick it off! Once one person starts the story, people can read it and add their part. You can do this live, of course. Or you could do this asynchronously utilizing a Discord channel or similar feature on community platforms such as Might Networks, Circle, or Geneva.
Of course, we encourage you to put your own spin on these ideas. And we’d love to hear from you in a reply to this email about some more of your ideas for rituals you could create to engage your audience and make more money from your author creator business. We will compile all the responses and share them with you all in our next newsletter.
I hope you all have a fantastic rest of your day. We will be back in your inbox soon, but in the meantime, don’t forget…
Storytellers Rule the World
P.S. This post was inspired by this incredible article on Ritual-based Social Media by Anu Atluru.