Posted on September 9, 2022
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Most indie authors think you have to decide between KU or Wide. With the emergence of creator economy and fandom-based platforms, there is a new path for authors. One that allows them to make the most of the retailers, but build their own fandoms, centered around a deeper connection with readers, ownership of data, and ultimately more money and freedom for authors.
Today, Monica Leonelle the creator of the Go Wide Grow Wide community and author of 18 nonfiction books for authors gives her insights on the publishing ecosystem for Indies, the role that retailers play, and why and how we can build and market our fandom-based businesses (such as subscriptions and crowdfunding).
Monica’s Links:
https://aggressivelywide.substack.com/
Free subscription insights delivered to your inbox each week: https://subscriptionsforauthors.com/
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Don’t forget to review/rate Subscriptions for Authors on your favorite podcast distributor 🙂
Beta-read Creator Economy for Authors: A Guide to the Future of Publishing by sending Michael an email at michael@mevansinked.com
#10 Episode Outline:
0:00 – 2:30 Introduction and Context
2:30 – 5:06 An Overview of the Indie Publishing Ecosystem
5:06 – 7:11 What does it mean to sell direct to readers?
7:11 – 9:05 How Monica Built Her Fiction Business in the Platform Ecosystem
9:05 – 11:30 Why Retailers Can Get You Readers, But Not Superfans
11:30 – 12:12 Emilia’s Censorship Problems, and Why Her Readers Will Follow Her Anywhere
12:12 – 17:05 The Business Models of Retailers v.s. Creator Economy Platforms
17:05 – 19:45 Discovering Readers with and without Retailers
19:45 – 21:29 The Average Pledge Amount for Publishing Kickstarter Campaigns
21:29 – 24:45 Repackaging Books for Multiple Platforms + Using Multiple Income Streams to Fuel Your Story Business
24:45 – 27:16 Using Crowdfunding and Subscriptions Together
27:16 – 30:40 How Monica Decides What Books She Will Write
30:40 – 35:20 How to Convert Readers to a Fan-based Platform
35:20 – 36:44 Marketing that Works for Subscriptions
36:44 – 41:22 What Will Make a Successful Author Creator in the Future
41:22 – 44:08 Update from Michael, Beta-Read Creator Economy for Authors: A Guide to the Future of Publishing
#10 Full Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Michael Evans: The publishing world has been lying to you KU versus wide. Yeah, no that debate is false. It’s made up and it’s actually hurting us authors. And today we’re bringing on Monica Leonel, the author of 18 non-fiction books. She’s also a fiction author as well. She writes a newsletter and runs a community, helping authors go beyond what build their own businesses, sell direct and build communi.
[00:00:24] Michael Evans: and readership centered around fandom. Now, what does this mean? What does it look like? It covers lots of different things. We’ll be talking about Kickstarter. We’ll be talking about subscriptions. We’ll be talking about the mindset that it takes to both adopt this business model. The kind of fears that readers may have when adopting this, but also most importantly, why authors should be doing this, how authors can do an excellent job at marketing. These kinds of fandom centric, business models, and really doing it in a way that isn’t quite as simple as by retailers or we’re only doing subscriptions or KU is the answer.
[00:00:56] Michael Evans: It’s kind of this beautiful path and a world that you get to carve out the [00:01:00] dream that you want. This is really like the kind of founding ethos. Why me and Emilia started this podcast. It’s a path that she’s followed really, really successfully for the last couple years and was able to make hundreds of thousands dollars a year around a fandom centric business model for her readership.
[00:01:15] Michael Evans: And me I’m someone who did the other path for years and saw kind of the downsides of what can happen when you write over a dozen novels. At least in my instance, run all these ads and build a readership that really isn’t yours, but instead is the customers of Amazon. So we. Learning today about how to turn readers into the customers of retailers, into your customers and why you should.
[00:01:36] Michael Evans: So I hope you enjoy this one. As always, Monica’s links are down in the description, you should definitely check out our community, check out our books. And as always with us, if you’re not part of the Subscriptions for Authors community, you should definitely join it. It’s really fun. We. How you can grow your subscription.
[00:01:50] Michael Evans: It’s an community of awesome authors, some who are just starting out and some who are making hundreds of thousand dollars a year in subscriptions. We also have a platform that is by fiction authors for [00:02:00] fiction authors that helps you run your subscription business. And it’s really fun. The launch link is down below.
[00:02:05] Michael Evans: So you just check that out and yeah, that’s it from us. Thank you so much for listening and definitely share this podcast with your friends, cuz this is something that is so important for all of us to know in the author C. It’s essential and it’s how we can really take power back the retailers and publishers and become creators ourselves.
[00:02:22] Michael Evans: So, let’s get into this one. I’m excited for it.
[00:02:25] Michael Evans: You have such a broad base of knowledge about this publishing ecosystem. And I think for a lot of us who are first coming into it, or who’ve maybe gone into it and focused on maybe Amazon are going one particular path of goingwide there’s just all these exciting new platforms and business models that exist.
[00:02:43] Michael Evans: And I know this is a big question, but we’re gonna get it kicked off of something like this. What would be your overview of this publishing ecosystem? Especially someone who’s written 17 or 18 books on it.
[00:02:52] Monica Leonelle: yeah, I actually love this question. This is the question everyone should be asking and, and nobody has asked me this before, so thank you [00:03:00] for asking this.
[00:03:01] Monica Leonelle: There’s so much right. I’ve written a bunch of books about all these different platforms and just looked at how they best work as individual platforms, but then how do you put it all together to be a cohesive system business model publishing?
[00:03:15] Monica Leonelle: Process, whatever you wanna call it. And I think a lot of what we need to focus on is with direct sales, which I think that you do really well, Emilia with your Patreon and I think that’s where kind of, all of us have to go is just in looking at this, it really seems , , something at the front end.
[00:03:34] Monica Leonelle: Obviously you need some sort of free. Way for people to read your stuff. So Wattpad Royal road, something like that, but I do think the next step is probably a fan based platform. So Kickstarter or Patreon just bringing people in as you are writing and bringing people into the process.
[00:03:53] Monica Leonelle: Writing and, and it could be subject to use. So, so any of the fan base platforms are kind of the next thing then [00:04:00] after that, I think there’s an opportunity to bring the, , more finished product to retailers. And to me, the direct sales on your website, it really works well with a back list.
[00:04:13] Monica Leonelle: The way I’ve seen it done best, and the way that it’s worked for me is to bundle multiple books together. So it’s kinda you have almost pieces of your work that you’re sharing at first. Which I know some people don’t like to do, I personally am , I prefer to do that. And then you kind of bundle into books, which then goes on to retailers.
[00:04:32] Monica Leonelle: And then the direct sales, I think, are in many ways bundles of bundles of books. Because retailers are not good at selling, they’re not good at selling bundles of books to readers. They’re very good at selling individual books to readers. And then you kind of hope that. Get that follow up, but the retailers are not always great at that either.
[00:04:52] Monica Leonelle: That would be kind of the system that I would recommend to authors. I think that really starts with learning how to serialize [00:05:00] your
[00:05:00] Michael Evans: work as well.
[00:05:01] Michael Evans: There there’s still so much jump unpack in this. Cuz you say something like selling direct and immediately go.
[00:05:05] Michael Evans: How would you define as selling direct? Because very rarely do I literally sell direct to reader and just hand them a copy my book and be like, thanks for the cash. There’s usually something. So for you, what would you define as direct sales?
[00:05:16] Monica Leonelle: Yeah, direct sales to me, it’s really three pillars. And I see it as the fan base platform.
[00:05:22] Monica Leonelle: So that’s Kickstarter Patreon. They’re kind of a hybrid between. Completely selling direct, through your website or, or even at a live event or signing and a retailer. So it’s like the platform has some visibility algorithm, something that they’re doing for you that you don’t have to do it for your yourself, but.
[00:05:43] Monica Leonelle: Also, you have to bring a lot of people to it yourself. They’re not gonna go and find readers for you the way retailers do. So that’s kind of pillar number one, the second pillar would be live events and signing.
[00:05:54] Monica Leonelle: So going to cons, going to your local farmer’s market, just hand selling your book really [00:06:00] anywhere which is important because it’s it’s a fan touch point and then the third thing would be selling from your selling direct from your website. So that is basically being your own retailer and even using your website to build your email list or build your audience more.
[00:06:16] Monica Leonelle: Right now we think of our websites as finding readers through an email list, sign up or something like that. But you can also, , put, , let’s say you had six books to put together. You can make that offer to somebody as a just through advertising and when they sign up, they’re not just a reader, but they’re also a customer.
[00:06:35] Monica Leonelle: I think those are the three pillars.
[00:06:36] Michael Evans: If people are wondering too, cuz I’ll just, I’ll do your promotion for you. Monica has written a series of wonderful books that will link down to in the description where if you’re wondering how to sell a book at an event how to sell, directing your website, how to sell on specific wide retailers, how to do.
[00:06:51] Michael Evans: A Kickstarter had to do subscriptions. She’s really covered almost all of this in book form that we can break down. So hopefully this conversation, just a good kind of [00:07:00] intro into the world of Monica, which given that world for yourself, your own business.
[00:07:06] Michael Evans: I know you have a fiction business, you have a non-fiction business, and then you also kind of , ancillary to your Fiction business, cuz you do paranormal romance work, you do tat cards and spiritual readings. That’s a lot going on. And for your own self, how are you kind of utilizing these platforms, this whole ecosystem?
[00:07:25] Michael Evans: Because , you, you can find your books in Amazon, you get discovery there, but you are selling direct. You’re doing so much. So break this down for us? It’s overwhelming to someone on the outside.
[00:07:34] Monica Leonelle: I wanna be really clear, I’m still building just the same as everybody else.
[00:07:38] Monica Leonelle: Nobody’s really doing it all. I don’t think, or not a ton of people are doing it all. Because there is so much to explore. I think one thing to think about is like, you don’t have to do it all. You get to forge your own path, whereas before, even like five years ago, going through retailers was really the way to create a career at this.
[00:07:55] Monica Leonelle: Readers weren’t ready and willing to [00:08:00] spend, , $50 on your Kickstarter campaign so we’re starting to. And the way that readers get used to that is really through like people doing it, like authors doing it. So I think that’s where the series that I wrote came in and, and lots of other people are doing this work too, which is great.
[00:08:16] Monica Leonelle: We need more people to do the work, but modeling all of those things shows authors what’s possible. And then authors should be picking and choosing what they wanna do and forging their own path to the career that they actually want, as opposed to, , ha feeling like, oh, I gotta like write to market rapid release right.
[00:08:36] Monica Leonelle: In the genre in order to do well at retailers, which. For many years was basically retailers was basically synonymous with Amazon. Like just because Amazon held and still holds about 90% of the us and UK markets and many of the other, at least like 50% of many of the other English language markets.[00:09:00]
[00:09:00] Monica Leonelle: For a long time. If you were doing Amazon in a certain way, then you weren’t going to succeed. And one of the most important things about this retailer versus direct sales conversation is that retailers they’re great at finding you casual readers and they’re not great.
[00:09:17] Monica Leonelle: Building fans because you can’t actually sell things at retailers that help you build fans. You can’t sell an ebook audio book, print book combo, you can’t sell anything signed. You can’t sell audio commentary. You can’t sell behind the scenes stuff.
[00:09:35] Monica Leonelle: There’s so many things you cannot sell with a retailer. And so because of that, it’s very, very hard to build. Fandom rather than readership, so that’s something that both Russell and I talk about Russell’s my business partner. But that’s something that we are trying to kind of impress on people is , yes, you have a readership, but is it fandom?
[00:09:53] Monica Leonelle: And so when we work with people through like Kickstarter or Paton, , they’ll be like, well, nobody’s coming over. I’m like, yeah, cuz they’re [00:10:00] readers. They’re they’re customers of the retailer. They’re not your customers until you make them, your customers. And , they’re not gonna follow you from platform to platform.
[00:10:10] Monica Leonelle: They’re not going to buy more from you until you likes them on more they bought like a $5 ebook from you or more likely they read your $5 ebook in. Kindle unlimited, which is a program they already paid for. If you want them to follow you everywhere or follow you to your other platforms or your next thing, you’ve gotta do that work to sell them even deeper on what you’re up to.
[00:10:34] Monica Leonelle: That’s kind of the foundation of what we’re teaching is like, you have a lot of casual readers, but if a retailer, if a retailer’s algorithm changes, then those casual readers go somewhere else. And then you maybe have no business or your business has suffered like quite a lot in terms of revenue.
[00:10:50] Monica Leonelle: Whereas if you. Use retailers to find those casual readers and then bring them deeper into your ecosystem and build a fandom around that. [00:11:00] Then you have a core group of people who will follow you everywhere. So I know you, , Emilia, you talked a lot about like Patreon and how there’s some censorship issues on Patreon and it’s like, if you needed to move to a different platform, Your readers are gonna follow you because they’re fandom as opposed to casual readers and that’s so important to your sustained career.
[00:11:24] Emilia Rose: That has happened on Patreon where I’ve been censored and they like shut my account down for a day. And everyone, like all of those fans, they get so angry for me. And when I say I’m going to move, they’re like, yes, we’ll move. As soon as you go. Where are you going? Like we wanna support you in any way.
[00:11:40] Emilia Rose: That’s so important to have as an author is to have those readers who will do anything for you. And a lot of people, I also agree a lot of people who are in not even just KU, but we’ll, we’ll take that as an example, they have.
[00:11:54] Emilia Rose: A huge readership, but not a lot of those people convert to true [00:12:00] super fans because they just read so much it’s like impossible to be a super fan of every single author that
[00:12:06] Monica Leonelle: you read.
[00:12:07] Michael Evans: This is really the problem that.
[00:12:09] Michael Evans: It’s plaguing a lot of authors with the way these technology platforms are built in a way. Cause another thing about Amazon as well is not just the thing about the readership, but also like the product design, the business model, which I’m really curious to hear your insights on Hanah because you’re someone who has really in depth background in business and has worked for a lot of these technology platforms and companies.
[00:12:30] Michael Evans: So as someone who can kind of take that view as both an author, but also. A technologist and business person, which for the record, all of us are mm-hmm you happen to have lots of experience in that? What do you think about the business models of these retailers and how are the business models different from we’ll call these maybe emerging creator platforms and for authors, what should they look for when trying to kind of meld their own business models with these other players that we are sometimes forced to work with?[00:13:00]
[00:13:00] Monica Leonelle: As a community, we kind of pick on Amazon a lot, but the truth is any of the big five retailers, which the big five retailers, in my view are Amazon apple books, Google playbooks, Cobo, and Barnes and noble.
[00:13:13] Monica Leonelle: So out of. Those five companies, four of them are massive internet conglomerates, and three of them are like the biggest companies on the planet. So let’s Google, apple, and Amazon, they have so much stake in creator communities. We’ll just focus on publishing. Amazon obviously has a huge stake in publishing, but even when you look at like Google Google has 80% of all cell devices in the world. they provide that and same with.
[00:13:45] Monica Leonelle: , same with apple. They have about 20 to 25, I guess. They have like everybody else basically. So there’s really only two cell phone companies in the world and it’s Google and apple. So they have a huge stake in publishing as well, because, [00:14:00] as publishing shifts to fiction apps and reading on your phone and also to audio those devices are gonna come into greater place.
[00:14:08] Monica Leonelle: Amazon has done a lot of things that have really particularly around exclusivity that have really held the publishing community back from building business models that serve us as opposed to serve. The retailers. Exclusivity is pretty harmful to us as a community overall, but honestly, if Google could do it, they probably would have if apple could do it, they probably would have.
[00:14:32] Monica Leonelle: So, because that’s just the nature of a big tech that’s what they, that’s what makes sense for them. Cobo has copied a lot of the same mechanisms that Amazon is using to build readership. And they, their own by Rakuten, which is a huge Japanese internet conglomerate as well.
[00:14:52] Monica Leonelle: I think it’s just the nature of retailers that they, they obviously wanna keep all their customers to themselves where like these fan base [00:15:00] platforms, they want you to have the customers, they’re not trying to own the data for. Your readers as much they usually provide that data to you.
[00:15:09] Monica Leonelle: I don’t know about patron, but I know Kickstarter provides that data to you. So you have the data for every single backer you have like their email address. You probably have their shipping address if you ask for it. That data is mine. Like if I wanna take those email addresses and go somewhere else, that’s mine to take, whereas the retailers, they keep all their customer data to themselves and they’re willing, it it’s like you are part of a catalog on retailers is the other thing. So your books.
[00:15:37] Monica Leonelle: The retailer is going to serve those up to their readers while it’s beneficial to them. And then if it’s not, if they’re not selling, then they will have no problem fi using someone else’s books to serve up to those readers. They own the customer relationship.
[00:15:52] Monica Leonelle: And you are just a partner to them. Where they should be in an author’s arsenal is they should be like a business [00:16:00] development partner, essentially. They help you find new people. They get you in front of their audience. And then you convert those people to your customers, but the way authors use them is like, these are my customers.
[00:16:12] Monica Leonelle: And. It’s not true I think that when those same authors move to these fan based platforms, they realize like, oh, it’s not that Patreon doesn’t work or it’s not that kickstart doesn’t work. It’s actually that reality is kind of slapping me in the face. And I actually don’t have as many customers as I thought I did.
[00:16:29] Monica Leonelle: Mm-hmm and I think authors are not quite getting that. That’s, , I think there. There’s a lot of like, oh, I could, I could, like, I I’ve seen, I’ve just seen stuff. That’s like, oh, , I could write another book rather than doing a Kickstarter campaign, for example. And it’s like, and, and it’s a better use of my time and I make more money and it’s like, yeah, in the short term you could.
[00:16:50] Monica Leonelle: But in the long term, , at some point you’re not gonna be a majorly popular author on this platform and the platform doesn’t [00:17:00] care about you.
[00:17:00] Michael Evans: Thinking about this business development reader discovery, , let’s say we’re shifting away our focus. Obviously being in programs like Ken unlimit does provide a lot more discovery on a retail like Amazon.
[00:17:12] Michael Evans: So it can make a lot of sense. Short term, I gotta cook my books in there to, , make a living, grow my audience and build a customer base, which I understand that’s a path that can work with some authors, but I want you to talk to us about some alternative discovery methods that don’t involve these retailers.
[00:17:27] Monica Leonelle: It’s a tough question. What do you use besides a retailer? It’s not that you need to necessarily shy away from retailers. You need to just understand where they belong in your business.
[00:17:37] Monica Leonelle: And if they are. Bringing people in casually then that’s great. And some, percentage of those people are gonna convert. It’s probably gonna be a small percentage. Using any platform to promote yourself And get paid to market yourself is kind of the best scenario.
[00:17:55] Monica Leonelle: When we teach Kickstarter , some of the books that we’ve done on Kickstarter, they become [00:18:00] the most popular book on retailers. And it’s really just that there was a lot of visibility it’s that we had to do a lot of Essentially sales and marketing beyond like a description or a blurb or a sample.
[00:18:13] Monica Leonelle: we talk about the book in more depth. If it’s a fiction book, , we send an email about the world. We send an email about the characters, I write fantasy. So it’s the world building. If you write romance, , maybe you’re sending an email about the book boyfriend or the hero of the story.
[00:18:28] Monica Leonelle: So you have to know your genre and what those readers care about. The way we teach Kickstarter is to like explain the book on a much deeper level and go through very systematically and make sure that people know what it is. And then whether or not they buy on Kickstarter, we don’t really care.
[00:18:46] Monica Leonelle: It’d be great if they bought a Kickstarter for doing kickstart campaign, but we also know that. Afterwards, that book is gonna do just so much better because we had the Kickstarter campaign on it. I think that happens a lot on all of these fan based platforms because[00:19:00] it really comes down to like fan investment.
[00:19:02] Monica Leonelle: And so when we talk about fan investment the way I think of it is that people give you their time, their money. Their energy and their space. And when you work with a retailer or when somebody finds your book on a retailer, they’re mostly just giving you their time. They may have given you a little bit of money, but it’s probably like $5 or less.
[00:19:22] Monica Leonelle: The only thing they’re really giving you often is their time. So they read the book usually, where if you use some of these fan-based platforms, they create this fandom, like so much more. Organically in that they’re probably paying more money to be with you on these platforms.
[00:19:40] Monica Leonelle: So like Patreon they’re, they’re actually like a subs. You’re like a subscription to them like Netflix which is huge. Like, it takes a lot for someone to decide to do that with you. For Kickstarter, the average. Backer amount is, 25 to $40 on the publishing project. And we’re also seeing higher ones.
[00:19:59] Monica Leonelle: Like our last [00:20:00] project had $115 as the backer average backer amount, which is huge. Like think of like all those people. If they just bought a book of ours, like that’s like $10 where , those 300 plus people they’ve spent like average over a hundred dollars on us. Like those are people who are fans now.
[00:20:19] Monica Leonelle: And then energy, , switching to other platforms it’s very easy to get a book on Amazon. You probably have a one click versus these other platforms. Like you may have to sign up for an account. You may have to learn about the platform. You may have to make a decision to work with the specific author to support the specific author.
[00:20:35] Monica Leonelle: So that’s a greater, energetic commitment. And then face is like, , do people have your books in their household? Like do they have a shelf dedicated to your books? Like that is a fan? They literally are paying for space in their home to like dedicate to you. That is somebody who’s a fan.
[00:20:54] Monica Leonelle: That’s not somebody who’s a casual reader. So these platforms create that. So organically [00:21:00] in ways that retailers do not. And I think that’s where if you’re finding readers through those platforms, you’re kind of skipping, all the casual reader parts. Anyway, back to the actual question.
[00:21:13] Monica Leonelle: I think the retailer is a great way to find readers, but also just doing these fan promotions also find these people who are going to stay with you longer
[00:21:24] Emilia Rose: All the different platforms, like even taking like serialized platforms, like pad or radish or Royal road, they all kind of feed into each other. Like you can use your, your little fandom you have on a Patreon to help promote your book on Amazon and get it to like a really high ranking and sell a lot of books there.
[00:21:43] Emilia Rose: And you could do like vice versa too. It’s really interesting that not more people are doing that and they don’t see. The benefit of using, I mean, it’s, it’s a lot to use all the platforms. It takes so much time and it’s such a learning curve sometimes, but there’s a real benefit to like having them all [00:22:00] feed into each other and selling more books and getting more fans too.
[00:22:03] Emilia Rose: That’s the most important thing,
[00:22:04] Michael Evans: you just described an interesting, like kind of book packaging. Transition that I think maybe is intimidating for a lot of others. And I wanna hear both your insights in this, because I know both of you have experienced in this, which is taking a book you might be publishing on a serial fiction app.
[00:22:19] Michael Evans: Let’s say a WAPA and then bringing that over to a retailer. That sounds lovely. And this, even when I guess works too, if you’re offering early access on a subscription platform early, and then putting that up on Amazon, what does that process look like of turning something that was serial fiction?
[00:22:35] Michael Evans: Into a book.
[00:22:36] Emilia Rose: Personally for me I just put it in a ebook, a EUB format. There’s nothing that changes for me because, the way I want readers to read on retailers is they come to a cliffhanger and they need to read the next chapter. Like, it’s the same thing.
[00:22:50] Emilia Rose: They don’t wanna stop reading. So they’re gonna continue to the next chapter, read that chapter and come to another cliffhanger. And then they’re gonna continue to read, like, it’s, I forgot the [00:23:00] word for it, but it’s just like, they need to continue to finish the book. And that’s how I write in serial formats.
[00:23:06] Emilia Rose: So for me, there’s not really anything that changes. Besides when I write in serial formats and release early access, I get a lot of fan feedback. So I’ll use that feedback to make the book even better. And then I’ll push it out to a retailer if that makes sense. But other than that, nothing really changes for me.
[00:23:25] Monica Leonelle: What I do is I switch the story structure, how you’re supposed to write like a scene and then a sequel. I’m like a big. Structure person. It just kind of doesn’t go the right way if I don’t like mark those structure beats.
[00:23:39] Monica Leonelle: I flip those and do like a sequel scene SQL scene, cuz then the scene always ends on the cliff hanger essentially. So when you’re serializing, I think that’s really important. If you kind of like intuitively know how to do that already. Don’t worry about what I’m saying, but if you’re like a structure person I think flipping those can be really helpful to [00:24:00] just understand like how to structure the scene to where it works a little bit better for serialization.
[00:24:05] Monica Leonelle: I think that the popular storytelling right now is around kind of the serialized structure a little bit more and with the clip hangers at the end of each chapter and not to say that it will always be popular. Like these things kind of go in and out of trend, I think where, like I was talking about this to another group of authors recently and they were saying yeah, 20 or 30 years ago, the popular thing to do was like have lots of description at the beginning and like, kind of have this slow build.
[00:24:35] Monica Leonelle: And right now I just think. Reader are just not having that. So , they’re not, they’re not available for that.
[00:24:40] Michael Evans: There’s definitely different segments to the market as well. And if authors are going more down traditionally published path, I still think they like to see that to a certain extent.
[00:24:48] Michael Evans: , at least one chapter of buildup. Whereas a lot of times , serial fiction apps can get right into the action, which I personally gravitate towards that kind of reading. But I think there’s always room for any author to [00:25:00] write any kind of story they want. Which is just a beautiful thing.
[00:25:03] Michael Evans: But when thinking about turning your audience and turning them into a community into a fandom, that is something that feels very complicated. And I’m curious for you, Monica, as you’ve been kind of going throughout your. Process of writing all of your books, teaching authors. What made you write subscriptions now, your subscription book.
[00:25:22] Michael Evans: I’m just curious about that.
[00:25:23] Monica Leonelle: So with the last kickstart campaign, we did, it was really just about our series book sales supercharge, and about going wide, of course. And so we kind of have written all the books on the retailers already. And so we had covered a lot of those platforms. The one, so after we launched the Kickstarter book, the one thing people asked for the most Patreon.
[00:25:44] Monica Leonelle: So we kind of already knew that that. One that people wanted. Kickster and Paton, they go together so well because Kickstarter is essentially like a one time payment for a reward and whatever popular rewards you [00:26:00] have on Kickstarter, you can bring them to Patreon and then make them a subscription payment.
[00:26:05] Monica Leonelle: So it kind of makes sense that like, , sometimes people will hit a Patreon and they’re not ready to subscribe to you for, , a year or five months or however long people, can shy away from subscriptions. Or like adding another, like monthly payment to their bills.
[00:26:22] Monica Leonelle: Whereas with Kickstarter, they might be willing to give you a shot for the same amount of money too. Somebody has like a $5 tier on Patreon. For a year of that, that would be $60. But the.
[00:26:35] Monica Leonelle: Reader potential fan will not buy on that. But then they’ll buy kind of the same thing on Kickstarter for like $50. We think that they go well together where you can use Kickstarter as like a front end to find people who are excited about fandom and then those people, might be more willing to buy the subscription later.
[00:26:56] Monica Leonelle: If you have a Patreon, you could probably do a big Kickstarter [00:27:00] because you have so many people who would probably be excited about, , like a special edition, hard cover the subscription and memberships book, people had suggested that to us.
[00:27:11] Monica Leonelle: So we didn’t come up with that on our own. So somebody suggested it to us and then we kept putting it to vote in we have this Facebook group called go, why grow wide on Facebook? It’s also facebook.com/group/go wide grow wide, .
[00:27:25] Monica Leonelle: It’s a free group. We kept putting it in the group and that book, just one over and over again. People are interested in expanding this more. So ream, , obviously when that comes out, that’s a subscription based model membership based model, but also a couple other platforms will be in that.
[00:27:42] Monica Leonelle: But it’s also just about the business of how does this business model work for publishing? Then there was a third book that was about indie bookstores, which again, we were not going to write, but because because fans. Because our readers wanted it. Then we decided that that would be what we write.
[00:27:58] Monica Leonelle: That book, those two books [00:28:00] we didn’t plan to write them. We just kind of went with what people were asking for, which is the great thing about these fanbase sites is that they’re gonna tell you what they actually want. and I’m sure those books are gonna end up being more successful than what we would’ve done in their place.
[00:28:14] Michael Evans: Your Kickstarter ended up doing really, really well for this. It ended up, I think, surpassing some of your stretch goals.
[00:28:20] Monica Leonelle: We hit five of the six of our stretch goals. So that was really cool. We also in left a flash goal at the beginning, so yeah, it was cool, but I mean, the reason we were hitting it, cuz we had a bunch of stuff in there that like people were not excited about.
[00:28:34] Monica Leonelle: And then we were like, okay, what are you excited about? So then we’re like, we’re gonna change it to this. And then all of a sudden it was moving again. So I think that is the power of the fan stuff. I see all the time, and these are authors who have like tons of experience.
[00:28:49] Monica Leonelle: So they’re like, I came up with this new series. Thought it was gonna do really well, completely flatlined on retailers. And , if you had a Patreon or a Kickstarter or something, [00:29:00] you would never have that experience, like you would never end up even getting to the point of writing much of that book at all.
[00:29:06] Monica Leonelle: Like you’d probably write the first couple chapters and then you would find out very quickly, people are not interested or you would maybe not even write it to begin with. You would have put it to a vote before that.
[00:29:18] Monica Leonelle: By having that core audience, you can save so much wasted time and energy and money later on. I don’t think retailers are good at giving you that feedback until after you’ve done a lot of work already. So I knew an author who had. I mean, there’s like a million authors who have done this, but this particular author they wrote the first book and then they had to still, they knew it was a flop, right when they put it out, but they still had to write two more books to finish the series just satisfy by the readers.
[00:29:46] Monica Leonelle: And it’s like, wow, that’s like six to 10 months of your life or whatever it was, ? That’s a lot of time to spend in your career on something that people didn’t even really want. I’ve
[00:29:56] Michael Evans: done that myself. I
[00:29:58] Monica Leonelle: have too. Yeah. [00:30:00] Like I get it. I’ve I’ve done this
[00:30:02] Michael Evans: yeah. , that’s something I deeply relate to.
[00:30:06] Michael Evans: To kind of get around this, tried to like make a cover. And this is before I knew, that fandom, platform’s a really good thing. This was three years ago. I knew Kickstarter page fund, existed, but I’m like, that’s not where authors hang out.
[00:30:17] Michael Evans: We’re on Amazon can eliminate, I was in that model. Right. So I decided. I’m just gonna put up a cover, put up prescription, put it on preorder, and we’re gonna test it with Facebook ads and see if it works, which was kind of ridiculous, but it did gimme an indicator right. Of if it was going to work.
[00:30:32] Michael Evans: And if that seems not very fun, it wasn’t super fun for me, but it was useful.
[00:30:35] Michael Evans: Maybe these other things. Are more fun and are more useful, which kind of thinking about what it takes to maybe be, a fandom author creator. I don’t know what we wanna label this as, but just the differences, in the mindset between I’m publishing to a retailer and I’m kind of creating this community, what would be some of your advice to authors making that
[00:30:56] Monica Leonelle: transit?
[00:30:57] Monica Leonelle: Yeah, it’s a big mindset shift and if you [00:31:00] are going to start to dabble in the fan base platforms, you have to make this mindset shift of it’s gonna be harder probably to find, like you’re asking a lot of people a lot of your readers as opposed to on a retailer, you’re asking very little of your readers.
[00:31:16] Monica Leonelle: And so realizing how much you’re asking a readers, it is gonna take longer to find readers who say yes to that. The first step, cuz I think a lot of people quit cuz they’re like, oh I only have like seven people on my or whatever. And it’s like, well it’s gonna take you some time to find people who are saying yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
[00:31:35] Monica Leonelle: As opposed to somebody who’s like, yeah. Okay. on a retailer. And then I think, , be willing to do more because. Ha you have a much bigger ask. A lot of the marketing that works at retailers is not gonna transfer over as well. You can’t just put out a blurb you’re gonna have to sell what you’re offering more.
[00:31:55] Monica Leonelle: You’re gonna have to work through more people’s fears, more people’s objections. , two of the [00:32:00] objections that come up the most on a fan base, platform, is this gonna be super inconvenient and horrible for me? Cause I can one click something on Amazon and I know how that works.
[00:32:10] Monica Leonelle: Versus am I gonna remember to log into this? Is this gonna be a convenient read? Those are all things that you have to address. And then the second one is is this creator gonna actually follow through? Cause I know if I’m buying something on Amazon, it’s a book it’s done.
[00:32:27] Monica Leonelle: I’m going to receive the book versus, or Amazon is gonna gimme my money back. That’s true on any re retailers, not just Amazon. If it’s like a Patreon or like a Kickstarter or whatever it’s like, is this person actually gonna deliver on this? Because lots of Kickstarters go unfulfilled, lots of Patreons go kind of dead.
[00:32:47] Monica Leonelle: Or like the creator stops updating or doesn’t update on the schedule or whatever it is. And you have to address things like that. It’s not as simple as a retailer where you just put up your blurb and you put up your book and you put up your sample and you get some [00:33:00] reviews, you’re gonna have to do more of the marketing that Amazon.
[00:33:04] Monica Leonelle: Or, another retailer is currently doing for you. There’s a longer spiel about that, but a retailer obviously they’re handling some of those objections for you around trust, but they’re doing a lot of other stuff for you too.
[00:33:16] Monica Leonelle: Somebody even looks at your product page, they’re sending an email behind the scenes saying Hey, we know this shoe looked at this, are you still interested when you’re not on Amazon, you have to do that yourself. That’s why on Kickstarter.
[00:33:29] Monica Leonelle: We teach people to email a lot more because Amazon’s not sending emails on your behalf. Or Kickstarter’s not sending emails on your behalf. So somebody is going to look at your case therapy page. They’re gonna be confused. They’re gonna. Wander away and you have to follow up with them and be like, Hey here’s some more about this Kickstarter campaign.
[00:33:48] Monica Leonelle: With a lot of these fan base platforms, we also teach To build a lead list ahead of time. And in conjunction with them because I’m sure people hit the Patreon page and they don’t buy. And if you don’t follow [00:34:00] up or if you don’t have a way to follow up, Then you lose ’em forever.
[00:34:04] Monica Leonelle: Same with direct sales. We sometimes see people like sending Facebook ads to like a product page on their website. And they’re like, people are looking at this, but they’re not buying it. And I’m like, do you have an abandoned cart thing? , Amazon does your abandoned cart, email sequence for you, ?
[00:34:20] Monica Leonelle: Like where you put it in the cart. You put in your Amazon cart and if you don’t buy it, they’re gonna send you an email. That’s like, Hey, you still have these items in your cart. Whereas, , if you’re doing it on your own, you have to put that piece into place.
[00:34:33] Monica Leonelle: And I think that’s where a lot of authors struggle with the transition cuz they have, they never really fully learned. Full sales funnel, marketing system, and how it all works. They really only learned enough to fill in the gaps for what Amazon doesn’t do for you. And so they try to bring their Amazon marketing over to Patreon or Kickstarter or direct, , website sales or whatever.
[00:34:57] Monica Leonelle: And they’re like, it’s not working , you have a lot [00:35:00] of gaps in that sales funnel. So it’s kind of. For people who do start on the fan base side, they know it all. And then when they go to retailers, they’re like, oh, I get this. I’m doing all this stuff already to make this successful.
[00:35:14] Emilia Rose: One question that people always ask me about marketing, a subscription is what kind of marketing can you do? And they always start with social media marketing and they’re like, oh, I could like put a pretty picture up and I can put a quote from the book and everyone is going to jump over and subscribe, but that’s not how it works.
[00:35:31] Emilia Rose: I’ve tested it in so many platforms and tried so many different things on social media to market a subscription, it’s extremely hard to convert anyone that way with just pictures and small little quotes here and there. Even on TikTok, it’s really difficult.
[00:35:48] Emilia Rose: Marketing a subscription, or even a Kickstarter is going to be a lot more work, but it’s going to bring in those fans who are really passionate about your books and your writing.
[00:35:59] Michael Evans: It’s [00:36:00] almost like becoming this author creator is being able to.
[00:36:04] Michael Evans: Kind of garner this new age of marketing. And I think that as much as it feels very intimidating, this is kind of a thing that as Monica was saying earlier, that didn’t really exist five years ago because technology and trust in different platforms outside of these walled gardens wasn’t there.
[00:36:22] Michael Evans: So this is something that big billion dollar companies are currently struggling with this. Isn’t something that oh, us authors, we’re behind it. And this is something that. Is upcoming it’s new in many ways. At least, I think a lot of us would agree that this is more and more with the future of publishing and heading and to kind of cap off this conversation.
[00:36:38] Michael Evans: I think you, you’ve talked about some really interesting things between data and you’ve talked about really interesting things about owning relationship to your customer. And I just wanted to gather your thoughts on, on where you see this evolving in the future, because we’ve seen. Technology progressed a lot over the last couple of years.
[00:36:52] Michael Evans: And a lot of these things that you’re talking about I’m curious, they’re newer platforms. Patreon was founded like 15 years after Amazon. [00:37:00] Kickstarter was, was founded also 15 plus years after Amazon. And obviously there’s new things on the horizon, especially I saw recent post .
[00:37:07] Michael Evans: You talk about AI generated art. There’s just a lot of these things going on. So I’m curious what excites you slash scares you the most about what’s coming for the author C.
[00:37:15] Monica Leonelle: I think AI generated everything is it it’s a, I wouldn’t say it scares me, I would say I think that we’re going to have to adjust, and it really is a good time to get into fan based stuff. Because , if a lot of pieces can be AI generated of what we do, then we really have to figure out what is the value of what we, as like humans are able to do and create and whether that’s like interacting really well with these tools which is awesome.
[00:37:44] Monica Leonelle: We’re gonna have to figure out , what do we offer to the community? , I think that goes beyond the AI generation piece. Another thing is that all these communities and business models are moving towards streaming and like all you can eat buffet.
[00:37:57] Monica Leonelle: So like Spotify, for example, [00:38:00] is also another huge internet conglomerate that’s entering the audiobook space. All of these companies, they want to get as much content as they can. And they went to stream it to readers at a very low rate and turn around and pay. Kriegers pennies.
[00:38:16] Monica Leonelle: And it’s a reader driven thing. It’s not the retailers, a lot of people wanna blame retailers or platforms for this, but it’s a reader driven thing. Readers want this all you can eat buffet for not a ton of money. And we are kind of like all the fan base stuff is kind of the opposite of that.
[00:38:32] Monica Leonelle: It’s why it’s a good time to get into it now, because I think that that is realistically where the value we can offer is , right now, a lot of fiction authors in particular, non-fiction authors kind of already get this, that they’re ebook their actual ebook, that they can sell for like 10 to $15 is not.
[00:38:52] Monica Leonelle: Their business. And it is more a loss leader for them. And I think fiction author, they’re going to get to that point as well. [00:39:00] Where they kind of realize the ebook cannot be the only piece of this business model. I have to have something whether it’s behind the scene stuff, whether it’s a call with my audience, whatever it is, I have to kind of be doing more To build, that readership or that fandom or that connection and figuring out what are readers excited about whether they actually wanna pay for.
[00:39:22] Monica Leonelle: That is very hard. The things I’m excited about is really that authors are able to forge their own path so you can decide what you want your business model to look like. You can decide based on your time, your energy, your writing speed. Whereas before I do think that it was very much.
[00:39:39] Monica Leonelle: Geared toward people who could write faster were able to dominate the industry a little bit more. That’s still a really good skillset to have, but I think there’s opportunities for people who don’t fit that, right. To market rapid release business model.
[00:39:56] Michael Evans: I couldn’t agree more.
[00:39:57] Michael Evans: I think we’re entering the age of [00:40:00] the world builders in a different sense than what people might think of in terms of fantasy and in science fiction. Although of course, that is in, in a fictional, literal sense. World building. But I think that people who can begin to build more and more brands specifically, when thinking about fiction around the emotion and connection that you’re providing your readers there’s, there’s so many different and interesting things you can do off that.
[00:40:23] Michael Evans: Whether it’s creating card games, there’s role playing games, being created, whether it’s, , getting into. At scale, if you’re collaborating with other authors, it’s now possible to do like virtual dining kitchens. I mean the amount of things that like can be done now, if you start to think big and give yourself the bandwidth to think about the world you’re building and not just the next chapter 24 7, think about the next chapter, like maybe 80% of your time.
[00:40:47] Michael Evans: I think it possibly to limit list for authors and, and Monica, you are someone who gave us incredible insights and a window into what this world looks like today, where it’s going tomorrow and how we can make most of it. So thank you so much for this conversation. And as [00:41:00] always, it links to find everything about Monica, her community all of her nonfiction books, everything that you can do to keep up with Monica.
[00:41:06] Michael Evans: You can check out and especially her upcoming releases for her subscription membership book, which I think all of us will be especially interested to check out. So anyways, thank you.
[00:41:15] Monica Leonelle: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:41:17] Michael Evans: All right. I hope y’all enjoyed this podcast. I am in college now just got back this week. So it’s been kind of a busy week in the land of subscriptions for authors, at least our team. And I want to work out after this, so I didn’t take a shower yet. So I kind of look messy, but we’re authors.
[00:41:34] Michael Evans: We can know what it’s like working from. busy lives. I don’t have kids, but a lot of us have kids. I am very, very grateful for y’all listening up to this point in the podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. Please let us know like what questions you wish we could have asked Monica because we might bring her back on again soon.
[00:41:51] Michael Evans: I don’t know. She’s a good friend of ours and we think she’s a fantastic thinker and leader. And of course, writer in this space. You know, for us at subscriptions for authors team, [00:42:00] we are getting ready to film our like second batch of podcasts. If you’re following us next week, we’ll be bringing on a bookstore owner who crushes it in subscriptions, which is amazing.
[00:42:10] Michael Evans: Like she runs a physical indie bookstore that makes a living on subscriptions online too. It’s kind of incredible. So we’re gonna talk to her about that. And we have some also incredible guests that we have lined up for future works, but we haven’t recorded those episodes yet. We kind of are batching our recording to really try and learn from each episode and make it better.
[00:42:29] Michael Evans: So please let us know what we can do to make this a more enjoyable listening experience for you. And as always, if you haven’t signed up for Ream yet to hear about the launch list, you definitely should. It’s down to the link below because we wanna make this the creator powered publishing platform starting by building an amazing place for authors to host their subscriptions, generate recurring revenue from their super fans.
[00:42:48] Michael Evans: Otherwise, I hope y’all are having an amazing week. Can’t wait to see y’all very, very soon, but in the meantime, don’t forget. Storytellers rule the world.