#1: How Emilia Rose Makes $100k+ From 2k Readers

Posted on June 23, 2022.

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Wondering how Emilia went from a college student to a Wattpad phenom turned six-figure author from subscriptions? In this episode, she breaks it all down for us :).

#1 EPISODE OUTLINE:

#1: Full Episode Transcript:

Michael Evans: [00:00:00] Hello, everyone! Welcome to Subscriptions for Authors Podcast. This is our first episode, which is really cool to say, but I’m here with the amazing Emilia Rose. She’s an author of steamy romance novels, and she makes over a hundred thousand dollars a year through subscriptions with only 2000 readers, which if you’re kind of hearing that and being like what?

Michael Evans: Like that, that doesn’t really make much sense. How does she do that? Well, that’s what we’re talking about today. So we’re super thankful to have her full disclosure: I’m great friends with Emilia. She’s an amazing person. And can’t wait to dive into all the knowledge she has to share today. We’re gonna be talking about her origin story.

Michael Evans: Every great author has a great origin story. Then we’re gonna be chatting about where she sees her career going in the future, because she’s kind of at the forefront of this really interesting movement to subscriptions. And a lot of authors are kind of buzzing about it. It’s why we’re starting this podcast. We wanna share the insights as we go along with you because spoiler alert Emilia won’t be going anywhere.

Michael Evans: She’s actually, my co-host. For [00:01:00] this episode, one co-host is interviewing another co-host . So I hope you enjoy this. And then for the ending we’re gonna be diving into some of her ideas about how authors can utilize subscriptions, which can sound complicated. But I promise you, these ideas are actually really simple to put in place, and I think can really help authors make a full-time living from their business and give readers an awesome time.

Michael Evans: So really happy to get into it all. And Emilia, just wanna say, hello, how are you doing?

Emilia Rose: Good. How are you?

Michael Evans: I’m doing good. In a hotel room at the moment, which I’ll chat more about at the end of the podcast, as we do a life update. So stick around to the end for that, if you want to, but I just wanna give a brief introduction if it wasn’t already obvious what Subscriptions for Authors is what this podcast aims to do.

Michael Evans: It’s a weekly podcast where we interview top authors who are utilizing subscriptions or other interesting models that we think are pushing forward the future of fiction. And our whole goal is that we believe subscriptions bring together reader communities [00:02:00] and enable authors to make a living and readers to be closer to their stories.

Michael Evans: So it’s just a, a great thing for the community and we want to help more of you become full-time authors and we want to help you, if you’re already a full-time, take control of your own platform and make more money from your community. So that’s what we’re exploring here. This is our first episode. So we’re, we’re gonna see how this goes and we want you in the comments or email us, reach out to us and let us know what we can do, what questions you have that we can talk about in these podcast episodes and a great place to ask them as well is our Subscriptions for Author’s Facebook Group.

Michael Evans: Just look it up on Facebook and you’ll find it. It’ll also be in the show notes. So with all of that said Emilia, I wanted to start, like I said, with your origin story, and I wanted to ask you what got you into writing, and I know you started writing on Wattpad. So what was that like? Cuz that’s a platform that’s kind of foreign to all of us authors, but some, some authors are very familiar with, so give us the low down.

Emilia Rose: Yeah. So I actually started reading on Wattpad, which is like this free website [00:03:00] where a lot of authors can release content to like, I think it’s like 90 million readers. I could be wrong. I think so. So yeah, so I started writing when I was in high school on there. As well as reading a lot of romance stories.

Emilia Rose: And then I stopped writing for a little bit in college, wanted just to take time off doing my own thing. And then I made something that I really, really enjoyed again. So I started writing and one of my stories really kind of like took off on Wattpad. And I think it hit like a few million reads and yeah, it was really crazy.

Emilia Rose: I’m just like a college student at this time. Like, whoa, this is a lot of reads, and my husband, he actually. Kind of pushed me and he was like, maybe you should start like monetizing. And at that time I had like zero confidence in my writing, in my business abilities. So I was like, no, we’re not gonna do that.

Emilia Rose: I’m just gonna release content for free. Let everyone just read whatever I write. But eventually he convinced me to start a Patreon which is the subscription platform [00:04:00] where readers pay per to access writing. And I started releasing, I think in like August of 2019, it like hit all of the romance tropes that people were really looking for on Wattpad.

Emilia Rose: And it kind of just, my Patreon kind of exploded to where I was making. Like, yeah, I think, I think I was making like six to $8,000 per month in november of 2019. And I like officially made the decision to like, not go to grad school and to pursue writing full time. So that’s sort of my, like how I got into subscriptions.

Michael Evans: That is, that is a wild ride. That really, yeah. It’s happened that fast and what perfect timing you didn’t ever have to, you know, get a real day job. Like so many of us.

Emilia Rose: I know it was like perfect timing. And when I told my family, they were like, obviously they, they were super supportive, [00:05:00] but like writing is such, it’s not like a lot of people see it as not stable as like an income, just because like normal when you’re publishing through Kindle, you always have to like advertise your books and spend loads of money trying to get more and more readers to pick up your book. But subscriptions in general are really cool because it’s a monthly income and it’s a lot more stable.

Emilia Rose: So for me, at least it was, I was more confident going into this as a full-time career because I had that monthly, monthly revenue coming in.

Michael Evans: Yeah. Nothing beats that it’s like the closest thing you can get to a paycheck if only we had health insurance and a 401k with that, but that’s alright. That’s covering a lot of the bases with just that paycheck there and you make that transition from Wattpad to Patreon kind of sound obvious like, oh yeah, I’ll just, you know, that’s the next step in monetizing my work going to subscriptions. But I really wanna dive into that because for me, and a lot of other authors, that’s [00:06:00] not the first thing we maybe necessarily think about. One author that comes to mind to me is Ashley Poston. And she wrote a book called Geekerella which blew up on Wattpad. She got picked up by traditional publishers and has made a lot of money doing that. And that’s a great thing for her. A lot of other authors have pivoted to just what I’ll call more self-publishing 1.0, and not, not saying that’s bad, but people just publishing on Amazon and putting their books up there and being able to direct their readers there.

Michael Evans: So why did you choose a subscription model? Because that, to me to make the jump from like, for free to like pay me monthly, it’s a really big jump.

Emilia Rose: Yeah. So actually my husband basically pushed me to do subscriptions. Like in the very beginning, I didn’t even know what Patreon was or like, I didn’t get the whole subscription thing in the beginning.

Emilia Rose: Just because it is so new and that’s not what you see. And this was like two, three years ago when like authors weren’t doing this at [00:07:00] all. And so it was definitely different, but for me it made sense. I released my rough drafts on Wattpad and on Patreon. I didn’t at the time I didn’t have the funds to have somebody edit the whole book and like create like a, a cover for it so that I could put it up on Amazon. I was like doing everything myself. Patreon was like the way where I can still give my rough drafts out, just give them kind of like my readers early access to them.

Michael Evans: So you were almost in a way still thinking about, well, eventually my books are gonna have to make it onto Amazon, but I can’t just take that jump because I need some money and I don’t have that.

Michael Evans: So, you know, Patreon, kind of is a place where you can do that and kind of accept quote, unquote donations from your fans. But in reality, these aren’t donations. So I want you to be really clear. Like what, why would someone go and subscribe to an author? How did you convince your readers? To join you [00:08:00] on this platform and read from you there, cuz that, that too seems like something that’s very difficult.

Emilia Rose: So it, it is very difficult, especially in the beginning. but what my readers get on Patreon or my subscription platform is they’re gonna get early access to all of my content. That’s eventually going to be free. So I might write. I might release chapter one on Wattpad for free. But on Patreon of the same story, I might be up to chapter five. And so people on my Patreon are going to get early access to four chapters and then every, every week that is kind of gonna grow.

Michael Evans: That basically changes it, that changes the whole mindset of being an author in a way, because. It’s not about anymore. How do I convince a reader to pay me, to read my book?

Michael Evans: It’s very difficult, you know, gotta get that description, looking perfect, cover right on for the genre, all these things that can be very difficult. It’s just, once someone reads [00:09:00] my book, how can I convince them that they need more of it and need it now? And are they willing to pay a premium for that?

Michael Evans: Which means you have to be. Really good at writing, but it also reduces friction. I would think at the surface to doing that. That’s why you got so many of those millions of views on Paton. So have you seen, once people come to your subscription platform? My first question would be like, I, I can get it.

Michael Evans: Like they want those next few chapters in your book. They’re willing on a sign up for a month, you know and pay. What is your fee for month right now?

Emilia Rose: So I have a $3 tier, a $5 tier and a $10.

Michael Evans: So it’s not 99 cents. You are forking over an amount of money that you could buy a whole other book with that, but they really want the next chapters.

Michael Evans: So I, I understand that. But what happens after that? After a couple months, are your readers staying with you? You’ve been doing it for three years. Do you think that you’re having a higher churn rate or are people really sticking with you and if so, why?[00:10:00]

Emilia Rose: I think people are really sticking with me.

Emilia Rose: I provide my Patreon supporters, a lot of content and a lot of it’s exclusive for like a limited amount of time just to them. And the reason I do this is because like, I wanna reward my followers on Patreon, just because like, they’re staying with me monthly. Like they’re, they’re paying me monthly to give them content.

Emilia Rose: It’s incredible just to like see the support and like the constant comments and like the community building on Patreon and just see like readers, enjoy my stories there.

Michael Evans: Yeah, that’s really cool. And I guess for people aren’t familiar with Patreon, cuz commenting in a book kind of sounds like an Amazon review, but Patreon and correct me if I’m wrong, it makes it a little bit easier at least to interact with the author

Emilia Rose: a little bit.

Emilia Rose: Yeah. Yes. There’s like a, like a board people can write on as well as after every post they can comment on that specific [00:11:00] post. They can message you directly as well. So that’s really cool.

Michael Evans: Oh yeah, that, that is a lot going on. And that, that kind of segues into a question about throughout these years of posting on, on Patreon and providing to your community, is it just early chapters or are you giving them updates in your writing?

Michael Evans: Do you treat it kind of like an exclusive newsletter too? What other things are you doing besides. Early chapters because at the surface early chapters kind of sounds really nice to me, really easy, like, is this all I have to do? So what’s the catch.

Emilia Rose: Most of it is early chapters but I’m also kind of expanding out now that I’m able to into different forms of storytelling, as well as like artwork.

Emilia Rose: I’m currently working on a graphic novel of one of my stories. That’s going to be coming out on Patreon too, as well as [00:12:00] audio shorts and audio books. But yeah, what I early access really helped me grow very quickly. But now that I’m at this point, for me, the next step is just like branching out as far as I can go. Developing my stories and adapting my stories into different forms for my audience.

Michael Evans: And, and with that, does that tie into how you’re continuing to bring new people in to your subscriptions? Cuz you said you reached six or $8,000 really quickly and I’d actually like to maybe go back and zoom into that timeline.

Michael Evans: What was next for you? Like when, what moment did you really realize. Is it gonna become real? Like, was it that moment or did it take a little bit of time to really sink in and then with that? What, what was it? Were you just okay with that? Or did you wanna keep growing it? Did you eventually get to publishing on Amazon?

Michael Evans: What was that next step for you after that initial success? [00:13:00]

Emilia Rose: So at that moment, when I reached, like, I think it was six, six to 8,000 per month, I definitely wanted to grow. Like I didn’t wanna stop. I thought it was super cool. And I come from like a low income background. So having like that much money come in per month was crazy just to like, just to see the number.

Emilia Rose: I definitely, I think it was in November of 2019, I posted or published my first book officially on Amazon. Since then I’ve been publishing. Two or three a year. I think this year I’m publishing like eight. I just have like a huge backlog of books that I haven’t published yet. So, yeah.

Emilia Rose: From there, my next step after publishing on Amazon was getting into audio books. I thought that was really cool. And that’s definitely some extra income per month that really helps out.

Michael Evans: Yeah, that’s great. And if you don’t mind me asking. You don’t have to give exact numbers, but what would the [00:14:00] split look like for you?

Michael Evans: So you have, you know, this we’ll say, and there was the, you know, one of the things you’re using the podcast six figure chunk of year coming in from subscriptions. Which is great. And what would be the split? Is that majority of your income? Is that just a portion of it? And what are those other streams for you?

Emilia Rose: Yeah, so I actually did, did a pie chart for the first time a couple weeks ago. Right now for this year only subscriptions are 45% of my income. I think, yeah, it’s, it’s almost half, like for, for the past two years it’s been probably like 70% of my income. So this is the first year dipped below 50, which is crazy, but it means like I’m growing other places.

Emilia Rose: I would say Amazon is probably. 35 to 40%. And then radish is another huge, huge player, especially in romance. And that’s prob that makes up probably like,[00:15:00] 20, I, I don’t know where we are at numbers right now. But yeah, it’s those are my three biggest income places I get income from right now.

Michael Evans: Yeah. That’s, that’s great. And that’s surprising. Diversified because for most authors and no, no shot at anyone because I’ve had my books in Ken unlimited. I’m getting ready to probably put ’em back in. But you have two income streams, eBooks, and then can unlimited page reads, which all come from one place.

Michael Evans: So that is quite interesting. And with what you were saying about giving early access, I wanna ask, make sure, mainly clarification for the audience, cuz I, I have been to your Amazon page, but are your books wide or are they in.

Emilia Rose: They’re wide, but what the early access thing could definitely, I think, work for people in KU.

Michael Evans: Yeah. And I, I think in the future, as we do this podcast, you’ll, you’ll see my story, which, not, not related to, you know, the, the Destiny’s story. We’ll, we’ll see how that progresses with it. And if I can learn from you, so that’ll be really cool, but [00:16:00] with Amazon, And with Patreon. And then with radish, you now are talking about three platforms and they all do certain things for authors.

Michael Evans: They all don’t do certain things for authors. People have their problems with them. People worship them, all of the sorts of things. When it comes to you and where you see yourself going, you, your income’s now starting to become more diversified. And when you see your future as an author and how you’re expanding.

Michael Evans: Where do you think you’re going? And what platforms do you think you’ll be spending most of your time on? And also something that’s been buzzing around a lot lately. Something that is definitely worthwhile for us thinking about is, how are you thinking about creating your own platforms? Like a dual question, what platforms you be spending time on and how are you thinking about creating your own platform?

Emilia Rose: Yeah. Personally, Amazon scares me a lot. So that’s why I’m, I’m trying to, trying to diversify as much as possible. I hear like horror stories all the [00:17:00] time that just Amazon accounts just get shut down for no reason at all. And that’s really scary if you like, depends like if like a huge chunk of your income comes from Amazon.

Emilia Rose: So yeah, like I said before, I’m creating a graphic novel. So hopefully like web toons will become like a, a bigger or a big chunk in my income. but subscriptions for me are what I’m focusing on. We’re on the cusp of creating a platform for fictionauthors for subscriptions. So subscriptions for fiction authors.

Michael Evans: That’s awesome. So I guess to clarify, you think a lot of your income in the future will continue to come from subscriptions and that as you continue finding new fans and diversifying your income streams, that’s really more like a top of funnel. And as they trickle down that bottom, the funnels still gonna be subscriptions and where most of your revenue’s coming from not to get too business -y on everyone.

Emilia Rose: Yes.

Michael Evans: I think that’s a helpful way of thinking about it. And then it feels funny asking questions about this because, disclaimer, I’m also [00:18:00] involved in working on said platform for fiction authors with Emilia, but, maybe just tell us in short what problems. And also what good things you face as an author with subscriptions in the current landscape.

Michael Evans: And we’ll just say by the current landscape, Patreon is the name we think of a lot. But also, you know, these things aren’t exclusive to just Patreon and then maybe with that, why you found it in your best interest to try and create a place that is, you know, owned and led by fiction authors.

Emilia Rose: Yeah. So the first thing that comes to mind. Being a romance author. Lot of times we get censored, especially dark romance, often more taboo romance authors. And it really, really sucks. Like there, I feel like there is not place for us to go. And we always have to, like, we have to write specific things in order to not, not be taken down in certain places.

Emilia Rose: So. That’s like a big problem that [00:19:00] I feel like romance authors just in general or authors in general have to face all the time. Especially it happens on Patreon too, because I had one of my stories taken down by Patreon. They forced me to remove it. I wanna say like a year ago now and I was bummed, but.

Emilia Rose: Yeah. So that’s a huge problem that romance authors are facing. One problem I had with Patreon or I still have with Patreon is they don’t have a e-reader at all. So it’s like, I upload chapter by chapter. So I’m uploading like chapter one into one post, submitting it or scheduling it. Then chapter two, I copy and paste it all and, and just like upload it.

Emilia Rose: And then readers have to actually go through all by posts. Like it’s a blog and find chapter one of the story in chapter two of this story, and it really sucks. It’s terrible. So hopefully on this, on this new platform that we’re building. These problems will be solved and [00:20:00] we will be way, way, way less restrictive with the content that can be put out by romance authors or by fiction authors in general, if you write something like very gory or violent, that’s fine.

Emilia Rose: And definitely solving like the e-reader problem with Patreon. as well as really, really building a, a community, a fan club, for fiction, because Patreon sort of, kind of does that, but it doesn’t enable like a lot more immersively while they’re reading, having like comments in line or interacting with other readers or reacting with like emojis to like certain comments that somebody says within a story.

Emilia Rose: So yeah. Hopefully, hopefully we’re creating something. That’s going to be like the future of fiction and the future of fan clubs for fiction authors

Michael Evans: I’m very biased. That sounds very, very cool. And when I met Emilia not too long ago, well actually now [00:21:00] I guess at this point, we’re going on a couple months, but when we met she was building a website, with who is now our chief technical officer, Sean Patnode for our project. So he’s engineering a lot of what you’re hearing right now. And it was just like a personal website that was kind of being built just for you. And when we met it just kind of sparked both of us, like, you know, that’s really cool.

Michael Evans: We think a lot of other authors can benefit from that, which, is also why we’re creating this podcast because wherever you wanna run your subscription business, however you wanna interact with your community, you know, whatever platforms you wanna use interface it. We think there’s a lot of opportunity and we also wanna build a place that you could potentially use as, as your hope for that.

Michael Evans: And, of course, we’re also hoping to bring you new fans in that and experiment ways of discovery, which we will kind of get into that. Now more specifically when you’re talking about tiers and rewarding people [00:22:00] that is somewhat ment because when I’ve always thought about my fiction, The biggest, like concern I’ve had is like for my first in series, like, should my book be free if it’s wide, should it be 99 cents KU or should be like 2.99 or 3 99?

Michael Evans: And the rest of my book nine series are usually 4 99. Maybe they can be 5 99, depending on maybe if you’re thriller or, you know, there’s different pricing strategies, but it’s kind of like then standard for the rest of the books in the series. And then you just run ads to the first book and you kind of call a day and then you’ve released a new product line and you’re probably already setting some pricing expectations with your readers.

Michael Evans: So that’s you. You’re kind of, you’re kind of there, but you can still change your price and I could still run price promotions, and that’s okay. But with the subscription, it’s like, oh, you’re kind of locked in. Like you could change your price, but that could also piss people off because you know what, I’ve been paying $3 for this for the last year.

Michael Evans: And you’re saying they can come in at two. Why? So you can see how, like it’s a bit more sensitive to pricing and how [00:23:00] that’s a little bit more difficult. So how did you navigate, you know, picking your own prices. And when thinking about you have a $3, $5, $10 tier, I want you to walk us through, like, what do readers get for subscribing at those different tiers and what are some ideas slash rewards that, you know, writers can give their readers to incentivize them to ideally go up to higher tiers.

Michael Evans: That sounds, I mean, $10 a month sounds better than $3 a month, but…

Emilia Rose: Great. Yeah. I guess I’ll do a breakdown of what I have right now. My $3 a month, everyone on my Patreon pretty much gets all the content that I’ve ever written. A few stories. And I’m currently updating, like, I wanna say two stories a week on my Patreon, as well as giving them.

Emilia Rose: Weekly short stories. And when I say short, I mean like 1000 words they get like short yeah, short bites of, of stories [00:24:00] that could be much longer. And they get one of those every single week, tier two, which is $5. They get everything from tier one, as well as one extra story that I update every week and audiobooks.

Emilia Rose: And then tier three, we have everything from tier one and tier two as well. One more exclusive story to tier tier three. And I, I wanna say like the people who are on my subscription platform, they’re my biggest fans. Yeah. So a lot of them are like supporting monthly at $3 a month. But if you, if you look at that over a whole year, that’s a lot more than them just.

Emilia Rose: Buying a couple of my books, which is really cool. And, and what’s also cool is a lot of people who are at the low tier or even like the mid or high tier they’ll, pre-order my eBooks on Amazon, or like they’ll, they’ll buy the paperbacks and hard [00:25:00] back. So, it’s not just what they get on Patreon. It’s like so much more.

Emilia Rose: But. I one piece of advice I would give, is not to set your tiers too low. When I first started, I started under my real name, which is Destiny Diess. And I had a Patreon where I had a $1 tier and I was giving people so much content for a $1 a month and it, it didn’t really work out well for me.

Emilia Rose: And so when I started my Emilia Rose Patreon. I set the lowest tier at $3. And not only did like the page, like the Patreon page explode and like so many readers, like flock to it, but it was much more manageable for me. Yeah. And I was still releasing like a lot of content, but I could do it with how much income I was making.

Emilia Rose: It didn’t really burn me at all.

Michael Evans: That’s fascinating.

Emilia Rose: So, yeah. So definitely don’t price yourself too low. A lot of people that I’ve [00:26:00] seen so far. Cause I do a lot of research on subscriptions and people running that right now, the lowest tier people or the average tier that authors have right now is $5 starting out like the lowest tier.

Michael Evans: Yeah. That, that makes sense to me. And. You know, I think that we’ll see how that evolves over time. When I think about it for myself, it’s it actually is hard to know. So I encourage people if you’re listening this to me, like, oh, well let me do a $3, $5, $10 tier. Good idea.

Michael Evans: It’s worked for Emilia. It’s worked for her readers, but I think that, you know, that is something that really does require research, but. I also think, you know, there is a general range, right? Like $20, $30 a month could work for certain readerships, but for a lot of readerships, if that’s just like access to your content and you’re trying to bring in more of a wider swap of your readership, to me, that sounds like that might be high, but there is a big difference between charging an average of $3 versus $5 a month to an author.

Michael Evans: That’s a [00:27:00] difference in income. If you can convert the same amount of people, you know, you will make almost double the money, which so that’s, that’s difficult. But one, one thing we will be doing. With our platform, which I’ll just say is called Ream is you wanna be releasing like transparent pricing data, meaning we’re going to be running studies on what’s working on our platform and releasing it to the public completely for free.

Michael Evans: And you could use that for any platform you use and hopefully you choose to be with us because it’s kind of a black box. We don’t really know what works for authors, cuz it’s a newer thing. But I’m so happy to hear that, like, you know, three and $5, like that’s not insignificant, like you said, you know, to make $60 in a year from a reader, you’d have to sell roughly $90, $95 worth of books on Amazon to them, which, unless you’re charging 9. 99 for an ebook, you’re writing like 20 books a year to make that.

Michael Evans: Whew. You know, that’s, that’s a lot, so, and never mind if you’re in Kindle Unlimited right. If you’re in Kindle Unlimited, like that’s gonna be even more difficult based on what the average novel length is, you know? So [00:28:00] I can see how the math works out and I can see how it’s been a great thing for your readers.

Michael Evans: I know people are probably listening to this being like, well, really though, like how do you get readers on there? And there’s so much that we’ll dive into and in future podcasts, I don’t want you to think like, this is, this is it. But I do wanna ask a question. I think really hits home at that, which is how did you brand yourself in a way that kind of readers know what to expect so that, you know, they’re coming back and they’re paying and they’re buying into something like, they obviously love you, but they love what you show them, which is your stories. But how are you thinking about that branding and world building so that people come in and are like, Hey, I wanna support you.

Emilia Rose: That’s a really good question. So my whole brand that I’ve built from the very start under this Penn name is. Really tons of spice really quickly in a book. And so steamy romance is like hot right now. I think everyone loves it, that reads romance or, or a lot of people. [00:29:00] And it it’s, it’s fairly steady, throughout like the years of like those kind of books selling.

Emilia Rose: So. I think like I mostly branded myself through we pad. And obviously that’s, it, it was difficult, to start because like, when everyone thinks of Wattpad they think of like, oh, like just a younger generation, like people in high school only read on we pad. but that’s not true. there’s tons of people who are ringing on Wattpad that are like 20 , 30, 40.

Emilia Rose: And much older as well who are looking for those kind of books and pretty much like every single book I write or every short story I write has tons of like smut in it basically. so I built my whole brand around like steamy romance. I, think, I hope that answers your question.

Michael Evans: I think it really does because it gives, you know, readers and expectation of what they’re coming back to.

Michael Evans: And I think on this point, a really [00:30:00] interesting talk to listen to it’s on the actually 20 books to 50 K YouTube channel, which I recommend is MD Cooper’s chat at like the last conference in Vegas, which would’ve been 2021. Vegas conference is incredible. And a lot of her talk is about marketing and brand.

Michael Evans: It’s like. Self-publishing like ultimate crash course. One of the best talks I’ve ever, ever heard about this space. And one of the things she talks about is finding your meta story. And I found that to be so eye-opening for me as an author, because you know, for you, you kind of have this more defined, I’ll call it emotional high that you’re giving your readers each time they enter their book.

Michael Evans: And for a lot of other authors, it’s a bit more difficult to actually understand. Mechanically what that is because you, you have it mechanically, like you’re, you’re bringing two characters together and having them, you know, connect in all sorts of, you know, entertaining, exciting ways. Right. And, and that’s great.

Michael Evans: That’s very difficult to [00:31:00] do in a, in a tasteful way, in a way that people want to come back and, and read for more, which is why people are rewarding you the way they are. But for me, I write speculative thrillers. And I like to say sci-fi thrillers, cause it sounds more genre, but really I write speculative thrillers, which are anything about the.

Michael Evans: Usually involving technology. It’s a little bit more difficult for me to go like, well, this is the moment they’re really like, you know, it’s this gun scene that I’m known for, like, come on right now. That’s not exactly how it works, but she made me really think about, well, what emotional feeling I giving someone as they’re reading my book.

Michael Evans: And ultimately that word is hope. And for me, it’s like the little guy battling against the elites, which for some people who aren’t as in a defined genre, um, and maybe don’t write something. That doesn’t feel as obvious as the service as like, oh, well of course Emilia knows hers, cuz she writes to me romance.

Michael Evans: You might be think sitting there thinking that and totally understand. But I think that mal Cooper’s branding talk about metas story will convince you that if you’re not already thinking about this and have it nailed down, like Amelia does, maybe it’s a little bit [00:32:00] more difficult for you because of what you write.

Michael Evans: Figure it out because it’ll, it’ll change everything for you no matter where you write. So I’m really glad you figured that out. And I think it’s really been great for you. And on that point, you know, once you bring people in once they’re there, the most important thing we’ve used, it it’s like a buzzword at this point, but I don’t know if anyone is quite short, it means which is building community.

Michael Evans: What is like a reader community you like, what does that mean when you hear that word and how have you cultivated yours?

Emilia Rose: Yeah, so I think, on Amazon and like wide retailers, like Barnes and Noble , Kobo, it’s really, really hard to foster a community with your readers. Like you, at the end of the books, your books, you might like ask people to, to go onto your, Facebook groups or whatever.

Emilia Rose: But it’s really hard to like, get people to start talking about your book within your. and I think Wattpad does a really awesome job with this because they allow like inline [00:33:00] commenting and people can like give real time reactions to your work and your stories. So yeah. So when, when I do community building on Patreon specifically, I love to like leave author notes at the end of my chapter.

Emilia Rose: And basically say like, Hey, what did you think of this? Like, what do you think is gonna happen next? What do you think like this person’s gonna die? Like who did this thing? People love commenting and just like giving me their theories of like what what’s going to happen. And so that is really cool.

Emilia Rose: And not only that, a lot of times I use my subscription platform for more than just, Asking my fans, what they think of specific stories or whatever, I’ll ask them like which story I should write next. and like I said before, I do like little snippets that are like a thousand words every week. And when I’m ready to write a new story, I’ll basically pull all of my people on [00:34:00] Patreon, and support us on patron and be like, all right, which store do you guys wanna see next?

Emilia Rose: Like which one are you like craving right now as a romance reader? And usually like, that story is going to do well in the market once I like publish it on Amazon. so it’s just like getting all this little feedback and having readers really come along on the journey with me of publishing.

Michael Evans: That really sounds magical.

Michael Evans: And the way that you describe it too, it’s like, yeah, this is something that we’re all doing as authors. Like we go through this process in our heads. And a lot of us already do share it on our newsletters, but you kind of have this intentionality and home with it and a place in which like people are responding in real time.

Michael Evans: That just, it makes it instead of a one to one experience, a one to not many experience, cause that sounds like, you know, too much, like we’re scaling and look at that. But one to everyone, like we’re all in it [00:35:00] together and that is. Something beautiful that, you know, as an author, we, a lot of us have Facebook groups.

Michael Evans: A lot of us have things like that. So I think this is all insights we can take and plug into what we’re doing. And if you’re thinking about, you know, running a subscription model for your business, I encourage you to reach out to me, reach out to Emilia, reach out to the Facebook group that we have linked in the comments.

Michael Evans: it’s something that could really benefit you. And for Amelia, as someone who’s very successful on her own, right on Amazon and Radish alone, you know, this is something that’s able to still become the lion’s share of her income, which I think is a sign that authors, if they do it right, and know how to build their community, I know how to bring people on here.

Michael Evans: And it’s probably something most successful authors are already doing. It can be a really awesome opportunity. And something that is less income that you’re dependent [00:36:00] on from one source, which to me sounds more like creative freedom, which I love. So I wanna thank you so much today for sharing with you.

Michael Evans: Some of your insights. I wish we could talk longer. Like this is just, we’re just scraping the surface here, but. I know if we go on for another hour, we’re gonna like only overwhelm people more. Like if you’re in the car, I’m sorry. Like I hope you didn’t stop driving to take notes. It’s dangerous. But if you’re at home and able to take notes, I hope you took some good notes.

Michael Evans: And just to cap this podcast off for like, this is our first time. So we’re just seeing how this goes. We’re gonna do a little life writer update, and feel free to leave because all of the educational value mostly is probably gone now. But. I hope you stick around because I think following our journeys and seeing how we’re operating our own business might be super interesting.

Michael Evans: So we’ll just try asking us one question to each other to end off the podcast each time and maybe it’ll evolve over time. So we’ll see. But Emilia, I’ll ask you, how has your writing been lately? [00:37:00]

Emilia Rose: Oh, my writing’s been good. Today was hard to get into it to do my update for tomorrow. But it’s good.

Emilia Rose: I have a whole series coming out this summer. I’m really excited for called Redford academy. It’s steamy high school, bad boy bully romance, basically. So I’m really excited. I’m working a lot on that and I’m doing some monster romances on the side, which are pretty cool. what about you?

Michael Evans: I’m not in a familiar environment.

Michael Evans: So I put my hand down on the table, which is always what I do, like put my hand on, down on my desk and the table turned because I’m in a hotel. And on the writing point, I was just recently at the 20 books screen tour, Oxford. And Cardiff dinner. I’m trying to remember the other cities I was at. And it was incredible.

Michael Evans: I was actually with Craig Martelle and he got me just very like grounded in the sci-fi thriller space, cuz he [00:38:00] writes kind of mesh of sci-fi too. Very similar in terms of our books. And I obviously like look up to him a lot in terms of just not only will he accomplish as an author, but who he is as a person.

Michael Evans: And the reason why I’m out here is cuz I’m. On the way to going to 20 books Madrid. So, if none of y’all know about 20 books, like I should recommend joining the Facebook group 20 books 50 K it’s a great community for authors. And there’s a lot of people in there now. So definitely like there’s probably a lot of stuff there for you, but if it’s overwhelming, totally get it too.

Michael Evans: I think this is a good time to end it here. Thank you so much, everyone for listening. Hope you had a great time. Please give us feedback. If you like this, if you don’t anything we can provide value to, we want, you know, have a great time and we’ll see you next time on the Subscriptions for Author’s Podcast.

Michael Evans: Bye.