By Emilia Rose September 3, 2022
Shirtaloon is an extremely successful LitRPG author who started his publishing journey on a free-content website called RoyalRoad. Here is how he uses subscriptions for his publishing:
Early Access
- Shirtaloon has one ongoing serial story that’s reached 600+ chapters. If you’re unfamiliar with serials, they are stories with (usually) short chapters and cliffhangers.
- Shirtaloon provides readers with three tiers that allow earlier and earlier access to this content before he releases it for free on RoyalRoad. $10 a month gives readers four weeks’ worth of early chapters. $1 a month gives readers one week’s worth of early chapters.
- In an interview with Elle Griffin, he states that most of his readers are at the $10 tier. We also interviewed Elle Griffin about how she makes $15,000+ a year in subscriptions as an author on our podcast. You can check it out here.
Serial Readers
- Because he writes serial fiction, he releases his content on serial fiction websites like RoyalRoad. On RoyalRoad, people can read for free. He drops chapters consistently and weekly, then directs his fans and followers to his subscription website to receive early access.
Community Building
- Shirtaloon provides a place for his readers to connect outside of his stories. He has 8,000+ people on his Discord and has built his following to 19k+ followers on RoyalRoad in four years.
- On Discord, he allows his readers to chat about his stories, report errors, post fan content, interact with bots, and more!
What can we learn from Shirtaloon? Serial fiction can be a great driver for subscriptions by getting readers into your story before they commit to a monthly payment. In Shirtaloon’s case, 1/3 of the followers of his story on Royal Road, He Who Fights Monsters.
But the biggest part of his success is something we all know too well: his incredible storytelling. If you can write for a specific community that needs your story, subscriptions can allow it to grow and for your fans to form bonds in your community that has enabled Shirtaloon to continue writing the same saga for 4 years.
In addition to subscriptions, he sells his ebooks on Amazon and has them enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. At the time of writing book 1 in his series has 7,000+ reviews and is ranked near the top 1,000 of the US store. His audiobook similarly has shown spectacular sales.
This means that monetizing through serials can allow you to reach a completely different audience than your typical Amazon reader, while inviting your biggest fans from all platforms to support you through subscription.
That’s it from us today! But before we go, we wanted to share something exciting with y’all :).
If you’re looking for a place to host your subscription and community as a fiction author that saves you time, is custom-made for books, and is easy and beautiful to use then we have the solution for you :).
Meet Ream The subscription platform by authors for authors. The same team that works on this newsletter founded Ream. If you’d like to join and get started for free today, visit here: https://reamstories.com/