By Michael Evans on January 6, 2023
Things were going great… or so I thought.
On Instagram, I received 200 fans who messaged me there alone.
That doesn’t count the dozens if not hundred+ emails.
This was on a small channel. At my peak, I reached 9,000 subscribers.
But people responded. They were connecting with my content. Connecting with me and my life as a science fiction author and student.
My channel quickly grew to 600,000 views a month. I made about $2,000 in Ad Sense in a single month. It changed my life.
But I got caught up in the numbers.
I was stressed. People were buying my books.
People were telling me that they were inspired to become fiction writers because of me. That I was motivating them to chase their dreams and “live boundlessly” as I chatted about in my videos.
These were just vlogs of my life. It took me a few hours to edit each one, no more than 5 hours of work per week.
But with the success pressure mounted.
As the messages flooded in, I found myself unable to respond overwhelmed as each hour new attention poured in. Thousands of YouTube commenters.
Instead, I tried to manufacture more views by replicating what worked in prior videos. It became less about authenticity sharing my life than it was about trying to create another video that could do well in the YouTube algorithm.
The audience noticed. They began to lose trust in me. And as the views started to drop, I stopped posting.
It’s been 2 years now. Since then a lot has happened… and it’s a wild, insightful story for another day.
But recently I got an email from one of those viewers. His name is Arjun.
He shared with me that my video of reading my college essay inspired him to write fiction about his passion for chemistry. The video, uploaded 2 years ago, has since been privated and he was emailing me to ask me to unprivate the video and to share it with a friend.
2 years later. There was still an impact.
Your stories are vehicles to create relationships with people at scale.
But if you’re anything like me, creating relationships with your readers personally can feel stressful.
I have a wandering creative mind, that likes to hyper-focus on what’s in front of me. Sometimes, even a simple thank you, can feel like an extra thing to do at the end of the day when I’m already tired and not able to get through my never-ending list of things to do.
This is a reminder that I understand you.
When we talk about building community in subscriptions, trust me it can be hard.
Especially in the beginning, and even more so as you gain momentum.
But nothing is more essential than that.
If I had focused on centering the relationships with my audience and building a community around that (a space where they could connect and form relationships too), I likely would have seen that YouTube channel and my writing career explode to new heights.
But it didn’t.
If I knew that there was a business model that could help me focus on building these deep connections over focusing on click-through rate and retention/AVD like the YouTube and Amazon algorithms prioritize, I may have not had my mental health spiral… leading me to a dark place where I got into a car crash while filming a video in the dead of night.
And most of all, I may have continued to make a positive impact on the life of my readers and viewers at a depth that I can’t even anticipate.
Arjun’s email inspired me to share my story with all of you.
And for authors looking to build relationships with their readers, here are my 5 biggest tips:
Tip #1: Don’t leave your readers “on read”.
Your readers want to feel heard. A simple thank you is better than no reply.
Tip #2: Create Space to Respond to Readers on Your Terms
Don’t feel pressure to reply to things instantly. You are not the customer service department.
You are the reader success department.
And it’s more important to build habits for the long term than anything else. Maybe once a week on Saturday mornings you take an hour to reply to reader messages and get to as much as possible. Set up a system and structure that work for you.
Tip #3: Personalization Goes a Long Way
People can tell when things have been written by templates. A simple Hey [first name] can make someone’s day and turn them into a superfan. If got even a quarter of my emails and commenters to become superfans, I’d have a very successful membership/subscription… but I didn’t… at least not yet.
Tip #4: Scale Your Relationships with Your Readers
As things scale, figure out how to scale your reader relationships. It was certainly manageable for me to reply to those DMs at the time. But if you are getting 20+ emails/messages a day, it can be very overwhelming and damn near impossible to keep up.
This is where the power of community comes in. You don’t have to put all the pressure on yourself to build relationships with your readers, but can instead have them build relationships with each other.
Onboarding is key here (we wrote an article all about that here), and don’t be afraid to empower your star readers to become moderators or other roles that give them a degree of status in the community. You want key people who can welcome others in and make them feel at home.
Tip #5: Create Personal Relationships at Scale
Brandon Sanderson has a full-time community team in his 60-person company.
You can hire a PA (personal assistant) to respond to fan mail if it gets too overwhelming. I recommend having them be open that they are part of your team and NOT actually you… it is better than not getting a response at all).
You could also have a PA or people part of your team pose as characters in your book and respond as if they are a character in your book. Readers will know it’s kind of like seeing Santa Claus in a mall… but people who believe in the story of Santa get so excited… hire your mall Santa… your readers are believers. For non-personal communication.
Think about how you can scale personal relationship building. You could start a YouTube Channel (I did this and it worked well). You could start live-streaming like Christopher Hopper. Or you could VTube (live stream as a digital version of your characters) like Author Z. Knight who we had on the podcast.
The point is to carve out time to interact with your readers in a way that is personal yet is more efficient than responding to each reader. Again, I recommend replying to readers personally for as long as possible, but layering this engagement in on top of that is still great for authors who want to give readers who don’t reach out (and those who do) an opportunity to further connect with you/your worlds/your characters.
And for authors who find personal responses too overwhelming due to the volume, I think a marketing activity like this is essential.
The big take away here is that building relationships with your community IS marketing. And it’s the most effective form of marketing out there. This is what we call subscription marketing (we wrote about that here). And it’s important to utilize whether you have a subscription or not. In fact, many authors only utilize this form of marketing (no ads, no group promos, etc.) and do very well.
I hope seeing my mistake and these tips, inspires you and gives you the tools to do better than I have in the past.