Posted on May 23, 2023.
After a year of working on Ream, the subscription platform by fiction authors for fiction authors, Emilia and Michael share the story of the platform, the Subscriptions for Authors community, and some key lessons for authors to learn from Ream’s growth so far.
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#33 Episode Outline:
0:00:00 Introduction
0:00:54 Why We Created Ream
0:05:39 What is Ream?
0:18:40 The Origin Story of Ream
0:42:38 10 Lessons From Ream for All Authors to Know
0:55:25 The Future of Ream
#33 Episode Transcript:
Michael Evans: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Subscriptions for Authors podcast. And this is an episode that we’ve been waiting to record since we started the podcast because months before we started the podcast, we started working on something called Ream.
And it’s a subscription platform by fiction authors for fiction authors. We’ve talked a bit about it on the podcast and episodes sprinkled in. A lot of you have probably heard about it. A lot of you might be excited for it. And the big news is that it is live open to the public for any author to join.
So welcome to Ream for everyone who’s joining and I’m so excited this moment been a very long time in the making.
Emilia Rose: I know. I’m really excited for it too. We’ve been working on it for a long time, and now it’s totally here.
Michael Evans: So it’s definitely been a journey. And today, what we’re gonna be doing in this podcast, it’s a special edition.
We’re gonna be sharing how we created the subscription platform for fiction authors. And [00:01:00] in doing that, we want to share first why a little bit about it. But we’re mostly gonna be talking about the story of Ream, all from how me and Emilia met to how this journey has gone the last year. And hopefully 10 takeaways.
10 lessons that’ll help you all in your author businesses. Because although Ream is not an author, Ream doesn’t write books. Ream is a technology platform that helps you cr create an awesome subscription and you make money from your books. Still, there’s a lot of overlapping lessons. So I first just want to talk about why we did this because it’s been now.
16 months since I think we met. It’s been about 13, 14 months since Ream deliberately was a thing and an entity working on. But obviously our journey is as Sean’s journey building it, Emilia’s husband and our her engineer extends before that. Your journey as an author and subscriptions [00:02:00] extends far beyond that.
And my journey as well extends far beyond that. But just this has been a pretty long while in the making. And why is it that we did this, or a better question, is why is it that you personally did this that I could share why I did it?
Emilia Rose: Of me? So for me, I was on Pedro for a long time, like two, three years.
And I’m a Steamy romance author as Monique. Probably most people know and they were constantly censoring me and removing my account and it was just a really toxic environment. And that besides the point, like they also have not a good setup for authors in general, especially if you’re delivering early access, it’s takes a long time to do anything on their platform and schedule post out for all your tears.
And I really needed a place that was just for authors and just for fiction authors specifically, that was and felt like a community. And [00:03:00] I felt at the time, and still now I feel like Patreon is not that place. And so that’s why I started working on Ream and working on this new platform for fiction authors to deliver like direct content and serializer subscription content.
Yeah, so that’s my story. Condensed.
Michael Evans: Yeah, that’s like a dead story. We’re gonna be diving in deeper, especially to Reham story today. Cuz I feel like you’ve heard so much about, Emilia’s background, subscription author and other episodes, but you probably haven’t heard about reams creation, like the behind the scenes, but For me, the thing I was most excited for and still always will be with re, is to create a place where storytellers rule the world.
It’s something that just is not language that we would’ve thought of as authors. We always are used to platforms ruling over us publishers and it’s funny because every wave of technology, we keep seeing these new waves, right? [00:04:00] We have the internet come and there’s this promise that creative people can be free, but in reality, these big technology platforms and these algorithms have had a lot of control over the work we create and how we run our business.
And there’s been tremendous opportunity, and no doubt, I believe it’s a better time to be a writer now than it was 25 or 30 years ago. But it’s still this sort of situation where we as the authors don’t have the direct connection to our audience. We don’t have the control or the say at the end of the day to price our stories how we want to and to really foster those deep relationships with our fans.
So I’m just excited to finally help authors do that and make this really by authors, for authors in the truest way possible. We’ll talk more about how we bootstrap this. This is literally owned and run by authors, and we deliberately made sure of that. We didn’t want to go down another path of potentially taking on capital and trying to make this thing the next insert buzzy tech name because That wasn’t what was best for authors.
It was to do this [00:05:00] with. Our community. And that’s what I’m most excited about, is to keep making friends with new authors and keep meeting new authors who are coming into our platform and just sharing with them hopefully this space of belonging that we’ve created for them and that they will then create for their readers, which is obviously a challenge, something we try and help you on this podcast.
So I’m just really pumped because I think finally as authors, we can take control and that’s just the biggest thing. We haven’t done that before and I think we can all come together and do it now. Yeah,
Emilia Rose: I agree. I’m really excited.
Michael Evans: It should be really fun. And it’s obviously early days for Ream, and I know a lot of, you’re wondering where are we going with things and just we’ll share a bit of maybe Reams future as a little epilogue at the end of this podcast because.
We’re really focused on the today and making ream as awesome as possible right now. [00:06:00] And we want you all to love what we have today, which I should share with you a bit about Ream cuz we’ve never really gone through all the little questions about Ream. So we’ll make this fast before we get into the juicy story.
But I think it’s important just for those of you listening who are like, okay, what is subscription platform? Bi fiction authors for fiction authors really mean? I think we should highlight some of those key things. And there’s none better to ask than Emilia, who now has been on Ream for over a hundred days.
Yes. After being on another subscription platform for nearly a thousand days. So you are there for a long time now. You’re here. And what are the big differences in your life as a ream author versus an author on other subscription platforms?
Emilia Rose: Yeah, so the biggest difference, and I think it’s honestly the most important, is readers and authors alike.
The books that you upload as an author are actually in book formats. On other subscription websites. You have to upload [00:07:00] chapter by chapter in the form of a post. So each chapter is a post, or you might do three chapters in one post, but readers have to scroll through your entire feed to find previous chapters, and it’s just a really clunky and not so great experience.
So on Ream, we’ve created what we call a social e-reader. And so it’s basically like a Kindle e-reader or Kindle app you read on it. And it’s one entire book. Each of your books you can upload as an entire separate book. And the chapters just load it in as you scroll. And we also have a social aspect to it, which my readers really love.
And on each paragraph you can, the reader can comment their reaction. So if it’s something super funny, they can do they can react to it with laughing emojis, or they can write a comment that says oh my gosh, this is so funny. I think X, Y, and Z is gonna happen. And so it really starts to like form that [00:08:00] community of people reading a book together.
I think that’s the biggest thing. Biggest feature on Ream that I love and that my readers love as well.
Michael Evans: Yeah, that’s it’s special. And I think that’s in a new age of publishing, CUNY is literally the greatest asset for authors. I wrote an essay about that I post in the Facebook group a while back, but it’s really important.
And just upfront, some other things about Reim that I know people are wondering. You’re probably wondering how much freedom costs, which is a very valid question. And we take a standard fee from all of our authors, which is a 10% fee, the revenue you make in the platform. So it’s free to use. It’s free to get started, and as you make money, we make money with you.
In addition to that, there’s a payment processing fee, which varies. It can vary, but it’s usually 2.9% plus 30 cents, and there’s some other payout fees associated with that, but it’s generally the same exact structure in terms of payment processing and payout fees as any other [00:09:00] platform you use. And
that standard 10% take rate is how we keep things simple across the board for everyone. All new features for all of our authors. Very important to us. And you also might be wondering, Hey, what if I don’t wanna start my subscription right now? Do I need to jump on re right now? Is this something I need to throw my life into?
And I’ll just say that, we are very excited about this. Hopefully you can feel that. But you should chart your subscription whenever works best for you. And if you wanna check out Ream now and create a free account and just see the platform, you can do that. You can just start to map out how it looks like for you and what your subscription might look like one day without feeling like you need to actually create your subscription today and start monetizing that.
You might not be ready for that yet. We understand. Another thing, and a very common thing is that, A lot of people when they start joining a new platform have this [00:10:00] expectation that you get in early and you’re gonna get all these new fans and you’re gonna be able to grow with the platform and be like the next big thing.
And we’d love to see that. But at the same time, I just wanna be very clear that dream is designed to help you connect in a deeper way with your existing fans and to generate more revenue through subscriptions. Our mission is not to be another platform or another retailer, but to instead be your platform, connect directly with your readers.
It’s unique. It’s one of a kind thing, but it’s different. And our promise to you is a bit different. If you are a new author with no readers and just looking to upload your contents, arraignment, have ream be the only place that you’re publishing, the only thing that you’ve done, this is your step one.
We’re very grateful, but the expectation I just wanna set with you is that you’re not gonna have thousands and thousands of fans flooding your ream all of a sudden magically, right? That just the expectation. I want to set up front for people. There’s a ton of amazing things about re, but discovery is something that on a, if we were a new platform that wanted [00:11:00] to just try and get as many authors to join it as fast as possible, we would make some ridiculous promise that join now.
This is gonna be the next big thing. And oh my God yeah, you’re gonna find all these new fans. Every new platform does that, and it’s that same old promise that ends up getting broken because it’s so hard to fulfill that promise. So I just wanna upfront say that we’re focused on building a sustainable business for you and helping you generate super fans that love what you’re doing and that takes time.
And it’s not something that I want people feeling like they have to FOMO into. I know ironic we’re launching and I’m telling you don’t FOMO into it, but that’s like actually how we feel about this cuz we did this to help you not to just have the whole world join ream because they think it’s the need to do thing.
Hopefully it’s a thing that you want to do and that’s best for your business. Yes,
Emilia Rose: 100%. A couple other frequently asked questions about ream is do we have a scheduler? And we’re happy to say yes. Our scheduler allows you to [00:12:00] schedule entire books a within a few clicks of a button so you don’t have to schedule each specific chapter.
You just can go into your book and schedule out the entire book based on what days you want, what times based on your time zones and what tiers you want those specific chapters to be published to.
Michael Evans: Yeah that’s a big one. And yeah, another thing that we have as well is that you get all the emails of your readers all the readers, and we have two separate options that you can set up on our platform.
One is a selling direct option where you actually not only get your reader’s emails, but you also get some of their payment data. It’s encrypted, it’s safe, don’t worry. But you get truly the ability to like, set up almost your own bookstore, almost like you’re selling on your own website. You get that much level of control and data on your subscribers.
It’s very unique and it’s really fun. But another thing that we enable you as well is to have a managed account through green, which a managed account. [00:13:00] Has us handle the sales tax and that for you. And both of these have the same 10% rate. We just, we’re actually, I think, the only platform for authors that does this.
We have multiple payout options, so you can choose to set up how you want your readers to pay you, how you want your business to function on the platform for what works best for you and your stage of your career. Most platforms force you down to either sell directly, which can scare a lot of authors because it’s hard to manage sales tax that it’s a challenge.
And then other platforms don’t allow you to sell direct if that’s what you wanna do. We let you do either one, whatever fits you and your business best, which is very unique. You can have unlimited accounts on Ream, so if you want to have like multiple pen names, go for it. You are more than welcome to do that.
Please do. So if you’d we will be launching in the near future a pen name feature that allows you to have multiple pages from the same account, but it’s not live yet. So if you are looking to one day have pen names and have ’em from one password and one account, [00:14:00] we have good news for you. But if you’re looking to set multiple pen names right now, that’s wonderful.
You’ll have to have separate logins for that, which is totally allowed. And another big thing is where is Ream Open? Is this open everywhere? And the answer is yes. Readers globally can use Ream and they can pay on Ream in 130 currencies. 130 plus currencies actually for authors. We’re open in 150 in current countries currently, so we pay out to 150 countries soon.
Hopefully in a year from now, we’ll be open to all 192 countries, but we’re open to most of the globe now. We’re very happy with that at this stage of being able to accomplish that and did that actually way faster than we imagined. So this is truly like re global. It’s here. Almost everyone can use it.
Yeah.
Emilia Rose: And then the last really huge Item is, there’s no, you do not have to be exclusive to Ream. You can have your books anywhere you want. You can offer whatever kind of [00:15:00] content within our guidelines that you want on Ream. You could be exclusive, you could be non-exclusive, and all the work that you post on Ream is your work.
We don’t take any ownership, and it’s now or
Michael Evans: ever, now, or ever. And in addition, we don’t dictate your benefits. So what you wanna offer your readers at what price is up to you. And you can change that any time. It’s your agReament with your readers. It’s your business. So if you decide to say, I wanna offer one chapter a month for $10, that’s beautiful.
If you don’t wanna offer any early access, any written content, you wanna focus on physical goods, or you wanna focus on live events like Zooms that you do with your readers, I don’t wanna overwhelm people with all the different things you could do on Ream right now, cuz we’ve had so many other podcasts that talk about that.
But I just wanna highlight that we don’t dictate what you do. You can change that any time and you can price it at anything you like. It’s full freedom. And why we’ve spent the last year creating the Facebook group, creating this podcast is to help you [00:16:00] navigate this world of freedom with community, with our community of authors who know so much and want to help you so that you could actually maximize this opportunity for yourself.
So we’re definitely very excited about that. And if anyone has any questions about Ream, feel free to reach out to our support. We’ll have our support on the website. We have a bunch of help guides that talk more and more about Ream. So if you have like more granular questions we’re happy to answer them.
We have a lot of the answers already up online. We’re not gonna take you through all of our help guides now because there might be some people listening who are like, I’m not using Ream and. I already have a subscription and I just listened to y’all to learn more about subscriptions. That’s great.
That’s what we’re here for. We wanted to help you, no matter what platform you use, no matter where you are, do subscriptions better as an author. So we’re gonna now share the story of Ream, but not just the story, but some lessons that can really help you all as you start your subscriptions and as you look to just take your author business to the next level.
So I wanna [00:17:00] bring it back to the origin for us, back to the beginning, and I don’t know if we’ve shared this live yet, but. How did me and you mean, and Emilia, because I feel like our background, like it doesn’t make a lot of sense that we would just we’re authors, we’re both authors, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense that I’m in college.
Like we, , we met when I was 19, so a 19 year old in college meets like some very young I think you were 23 when we met, maybe. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Like we were both, we’re both like two years older now, which is wild. But we met and then sh she lives like, Not in my city. We don’t, there’s no contact there.
So how did our paths cross? Cuz it’s a unique story.
Emilia Rose: Yes. It’s ever unique. So I was working with this other company who was creating a serial fiction app and Michael reached out to me. I had did done an article or they had done an article and they mentioned my name or something like that.
Yeah. But Michael reached out to me and he was like, Hey so what about [00:18:00] tell me more about this company. And I connected him with the people who were there. And that was like, it it was like a month or two later. I, we didn’t really talk that much after that. And then a while after, You contacted me again if you would like to continue.
Michael Evans: Yeah. So it was such a weird time. Like it was really weird During this period I was like really determined to get involved and try and build something that could help authors and a new creator economy publishing platform. I had seen what YouTubers were doing. I had live streamed full-time for almost a year myself.
And after being an author and then being a YouTuber and a live streamer, I realized the CUNY that the next generation of creators are building is really powerful, lends to a lot of new business models. And it’s really hard for us as authors to tap into that. So I started literally just searching anyone in publishing who I thought was doing something interesting and reading about their company and contacting them.
And during this [00:19:00] period, I started to realize the problem with a lot of companies in publishing, which is that the people running them ha are not authored. Yeah. They’re really not part of the cuny. So the first company I chatted with they immediately asked me because of my background to join as a co-founder and B C E O.
Long story short, that company ended up losing all of its investor money. I never signed on. I was like, whoa, bad idea. But in the middle of this, there’s the company that Emilia was the lead author for, and then I had found, and I was reaching out to them too, cuz again, I knew that you can’t do anything great alone and you need to meet people.
I need to see what was going on. And this was the same old story, if not even worse. These people were just not Yeah. Part of the community. They weren’t really understanding the vision. And if anything, were really taking Emilia’s intellectual property and what Emilia had done with her business and doing two things, discounting her and then using it to build.
Their own empire, which we’ve seen time and [00:20:00] time again. So they brought me in because I, they assumed okay, Michael likes books, but he’s more like the business side of things. So he’ll run the company, he’ll be the ceo, O and am Emil will just be like an author. They just immediately discounted you.
They never even asked you. I know. And they had
Emilia Rose: so long It was it was very frustrating because I was like, I have built this business subscription business that’s doing really well. It’s doing six figures a year, and I have been like the business mind behind it. And I, I’m not saying that you wouldn’t come in and Make the company really great if we had decided to go through to that route.
But I was just like, they had, they did not talk to me about this at all. And so Michael came to me and he was like, so they’re asking me to be the like CEO and run the company. I was like, oh my God, what is going on?
Michael Evans: And at this time of my life, I was already so jaded where I’m like, here it’s here we go again.
I’ve seen this. And I wasn’t like, I, let’s put it this way, I wasn’t like, jumping head over heels about it. It was [00:21:00] something that I knew Emilia had something special and I knew Emilia was really special and I was like, we need to really talk here. And that’s when we’ve figured a few things out.
One we should just work together. And two, we should work together with Sean, which is your husband who is also incredible and is a software engineer who’s been. Coding things for well over a decade and has basically all the experience we needed to be able to build ream. When we put all of us together, it was pretty clear how it would go, we would be able to do this together.
So that was like the first big thing. And it definitely came from Sarah Serendipity, but also recognizing that this industry puts business people and the money on one side and then the authors and the creative people on the other side. Yeah. And oftentimes those people look [00:22:00] down upon authors and look down upon the businesses that we’ve built and what these people are capable of.
And is Emilia someone who’s built an incredible business and author, they didn’t look at her like equals in this situation. And I knew that we needed to look at each other as equals and be like, okay, we can do this together. And that’s when Ream started. We officially incorporated re Raymond’s birthday is like on March 30th, so that’s March 30th, 2022.
And it’s been a wild year. It started with us realizing a few things. It started with us realizing that we wanted to build, and we didn’t have some sort of grand strategic plan going into this, but we had the ethos, which was we wanna build a community of authors. That’s how we want to get this off the ground.
And we don’t want to just, grow ream or share ream with the world by just like spending money and advertising and hawking our service in the corner. We want to instead make friends with people who are [00:23:00] interested in this and really like help teach people no matter what path they wanna go down to, how to make their career better.
So I believe you officially started the Facebook group and you shared it I think in one or two groups, maybe like low key, like in a comment section. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And we had maybe like a couple dozen people join, which you were floored with. I was like, wow, like people are interested in subscriptions for authors because although Emilia had found so much success at this business model, it was something that was still really not mainstream at all.
And it still is. It’s becoming, in the last year, I feel like the conversation around subscriptions has really picked up. And yeah, we’re so grateful for the energy around it, but when we first started, it wasn’t clear just how many authors would be interested, but then it started growing and I believe we went to like four or five conferences.
Yeah,
Emilia Rose: it quite the first two months. [00:24:00] Yeah. It was a lot.
Michael Evans: Yeah, it definitely was a lot. We had the mindset that. If we built relationships like on the ground floor and put in the time to build this community from from scratch, essentially with like genuine connections with people, genuine friendships with people we respected that like this would be like the best way to like market a tech company, which is not the traditional way that people go about these things.
40% of venture capital dollars usually funnel right back into Facebook. At Google adss, we had a very different approach. So what we did is I think went to all these conferences, met like a few people there. We didn’t have any booths. We didn’t, we weren’t sponsoring anything. We just were there and ended up traveling a lot.
It was a lot of fun, but it was also very tiring. But when we got back through all of that, we launched the podcast towards the end of that summer and we started really taking ream behind the scenes to the next level cuz Sean [00:25:00] had built. The bare bones outside and now that bare bones was becoming something real.
And that’s when we started to share it with a few of you very quietly about now, 10 months ago. Yeah.
Emilia Rose: Oh my gosh. That’s crazy. I feel like it’s been so long, but also very quick. It happened very quickly.
Michael Evans: When you start to think on instead of days, weeks, instead of weeks, months instead of months, years in terms of like your creative output, it gives you a lot of freedom and it enables you to shoot for bigger goals in a more sustainable way.
And I think what we always had done was we didn’t, we weren’t searching for the quick win, the easy way to just get a few people in. We wanted to build a really strong foundation for this, which I think is a really important takeaway for people in their author businesses. You’re building real relationships with people that you might not blow up overnight, like deliberately.
That was never a goal. We’ve never post on TikTok. We’ve deliberately [00:26:00] done like very minimal, if any, outbound sort of marketing or outreach. We’ve very organically focused on making the people who already have trusted to spend their time with us to be a part of our cui, try and make your experience better.
And we have so much else we want to do, but I think that’s like. The big thing is authors that we miss oftentimes too, we’re so focused on finding new people, on finding new this, new that we don’t settle on. Hey, like what we have here is already great. And I think that’s what’s unique about subscriptions, the business model itself and what empowers us as a platform.
When an author starts making subscription revenue on re, it’s way easier for us to help them do better than it is for us to go out and find 10 new authors who can release another book next month. Like in a traditional model, when a reader has bought that book, they can’t buy that book again. So if you wanna continue serving that reader, gotta have another book.
And you as a platform, you don’t care who that author is, you just throw ’em in there. But in our situation, it’s no, we actually want our [00:27:00] authors to foster unbelievably deep relationships with their readers because that’s how this works. And we try to do the same thing and it’s been fun.
Emilia Rose: Yeah. It has.
I, and that’s something like with subscriptions, like we adopted that mindset because when you’re running a subscription, like that’s the mindset you have to have. And it’s been, I’ve enjoyed getting to know all the authors that we’ve connected with over the past like year, and it’s been really, it’s been really amazing to, to like actually get to know who they are as a person and how they run their business.
So yeah. Thank you for everyone that we’ve connected with throughout this past year. It’s been really awesome and helpful.
Michael Evans: Yeah. No, it’s been li it’s been life changing. I like a year ago had really felt like, Being part of the Author Queen was all I wanted to do. [00:28:00] But if I’m being honest, if I go back two years, I didn’t really know anyone in the author Korean, oh, me, YouTube, or other places, but really knew no one.
And in the last year, my whole world’s been opened up to all these beautiful people and real friendships. That just would’ve been impossible. So I’m so grateful for you, Emilia, for Sean, for allowing me to be able to work on this and for all of you for allowing us to be able to do this because this has been something that we really wanted to run our business, like an indie author.
And that goes back to another decision we made really early on. So it’s very common that technology platforms will receive an outside investment. And I don’t think there’s just upfront anything wrong with Having investors in a company, and I think investors can be great, and that capital can be awesome to grow a business.
I also am very [00:29:00] aware that not everyone is able to bootstrap a company or even bootstrap a publishing business. Like it. It’s very challenging and we’re lucky that we were able to get very gritty or scrappy with this and be able to make this work the last year, being able to bootstrap this, but that’s what we’ve done.
We, we knew that 99 plus percent of authors bootstrap their own businesses. You don’t have investors who are saying, Hey, I like that great story idea. Here’s a check. Don’t have to worry about working your job for next year. And. Talk to me in a year. Hopefully you’re making money full-time and you’ll give me some of that.
That would be cool. And there’s that would be interesting, right? But that’s just not an opportunity that our authors have regardless of the future or a changing industry. Where we are at right now, the authors that we’re serving have not had that experience. I did not have that experience as an author.
You did not have that atmosphere is not Emilia. So we knew that if we wanted to build this, not only [00:30:00] for our community, but with our community, that we had to do it like ’em too. We had to walk the talk. And that meant, yeah, literally not spending any, like up to this point, like outside of travel costs, we have run ream, like unbelievably lean and exactly like an author would have to in the beginning doing all the little things yourself.
Spending those late nights and making it so that at the end of the day, We could continue to serve the interests of our CUNY because we don’t have this expectation. This is another big thing. We’ve learned this expectation to be X big by X state and that have a perverse incentive that makes us not serve the fiction authors that we really care about, and especially our romance authors that we really care about because we wanna have and do have very open content guidelines, [00:31:00] and we want to be able to create a space and have worked since literally last July to develop relationships with payment partners and other sorts of vendors that allow us to be able to give our romance authors freedom.
That was so important to us to empower a group of storytellers that are helping so many people across the world and whose voices are shut out. But we couldn’t do that if someone else. Was the one who got to call the shots and another person’s incentives who maybe goes that’s not mainstream enough for us.
Or that’s not gonna be the thing at the end of the day that we support. We don’t understand that because again, they’re probably not romance authors. They’re probably not romance readers. And that’s been probably the biggest thing of us. Cause it’s actually given us freedom to be able to do this, we think the right way.
But definitely the way that you all want it cuz we listened.
Emilia Rose: Yeah. Yeah. That’s something really important to us is to give a [00:32:00] voice to all or as many authors as we can. And something else that we’ve done, what authors do, a lot of tech companies do this too. But we have taken what Sean has created and we launched into a, we released into a beta earlier this year.
And so we got feedback from our beta testers and we’ve made like really key changes to make the platform a lot better and function a lot better for authors. And one of them we were talking about a bit before, but it was re managed versus our standard. So originally we just had a standard account where it was like direct sales specifically, like you get the pa most of the payment information as an author, but you had to deal with taxes and that and all that.
And a lot of we’ve, we heard through the community that a lot of people didn’t even wanna think about taxes. They don’t want that stress or added pressure. Yeah. And so we [00:33:00] did add a re managed, which is currently live And so that’s just one of the key changes that we’ve made based on everyone’s feedback and we’re all always open to making more to make this experience a lot better for you guys.
Michael Evans: Another one was the CUNY section. We really revamped that so that you can have on ream a section for your stories and to connect with your readers through the chapters that you’re publishing or the books, the other content. And then a separate almost Facebook group like CUNY inside of Ream that allows you to publish posts, both the public and also to pay tiers.
And it really is a very interesting and clean set up because now when readers come in, they have their library, they have the cuny, and it’s almost like they enter your own little world when they’re inside of your room. And we worked really hard to make that not only a great experience for readers, but a great experience for you as an author.
Managing that because the last [00:34:00] thing we want you to do is feel more stress and this unbelievable expectation around managing your ream because what we’ve tried to do as a company, as a Ream, one of our big lessons has been we wanna set realistic expectations and we wanna also set goals that keep us accountable to our principles, our values.
And these are, this is what we like stand by as a company and our ethos. We want to be helping everyone build a sustainable living from their stories. Our mission literally is to help more authors build a sustainable living from their stories, powered by subscription revenue. That is our mission like period.
And our purpose is we want to create a future where storytellers of the world and the things that we value, and this is just what we stick to have been what we’ve st really honed in on over the last year. And it’s been challenging because, Character over plot is important to us. What that means is that we don’t just care about how things get done, but [00:35:00] sorry.
We don’t just care about what gets done, but how and why we do the things we do. And this is challenging because we’ve had so many times in the last year where we never wanted, we don’t want your author business to control you, to rule over you. And Ream has been a very intense experience, just like running an author businesses that’s starting to do well and starting to gain the tension of readers.
And it’s been something and moments for us that we’ve had to constantly make sure that this doesn’t take over us. That this doesn’t become like this waking every waking second type of thing. And it’s a very big challenge because as. As much energy that you all have brought to this that we’re so grateful for.
There’s always new things and new challenges that we wanna do to try and make it better. And it can feel never ending, just like it can feel never ending as an author. All the different projects and the things you wanna do that you’re passionate about. So we’ve had to be really intentional and trying to [00:36:00] balance it so we can stick true to that value.
It’s hard.
Emilia Rose: That’s very hard. And we we’re still, we still have to face that every day. Yeah, how much energy are we going to put towards certain features because we really wanna add them. But we also have other I have a, my author business that I need to put energy towards as well.
And we, you and Sean have other things that you are also doing on, in the background and other projects that you’re working on that also require energy and you need. Energy to deal with family stuff. And so yeah, we’re constantly, it’s the point. Yeah. Yeah. We all have lives that we we also, yeah. I dunno how to finish that.
Michael Evans: No, I think it’s important cuz I, like you all get like the subscription version of us on the podcast who’s helping give you advice and really trying to help you take your business to the next [00:37:00] level. But behind the scenes, over, over the last year of my life personally, I’ve been in college, that’s what I’ve been doing.
I work on ream a lot, like beyond full-time in terms of the hours I put into it, but, I still have to show up to class. I still have to, make that happen. And it’s a great opportunity. We’ve had so many interesting things come to ream from the programs I have at my school, but that’s also another challenge.
It’s like a lot of you probably have day jobs, Sean literally had a day job up until January and that’s when he went full-time. Or at least quit his job on Raheem or quit his job to work on Ream, which was a big step, but also something that is a big risk. So we’ve all are going through these different stages in terms of living, like what you all probably deeply relate to.
We talk about doing subscriptions here, but how about the rest of your life? And it’s been super fun, but it’s also so crazy [00:38:00] frankly, to see your dream come true. But it’s not, and never is it overnight. So it like unfolds in slow motion. Like you’re not gonna wake up one day very rarely and see like that Kindle chart at one sale and then a thousand the next day.
It’s much more like that slow climb, but you can see it starting to unfold. Yeah. And it’s been like that with us at Ream. Like we there was a magic in the beginning. We felt like we were onto something and it slowly started to grow. Where like now, today, like our dream has only come true. It’s here for all of you.
We can make this our dream together. But it’s a very overwhelming feeling actually to then, wake up every day and that be like the thing you’re worried about, the thing you’re thinking about because it’s like you’re living in this movie of sorts that isn’t an actual movie, it’s your life.
Emilia Rose: Yeah.
What? It’s fun. It’s very
Michael Evans: fun. No, it’s really fun. It’s fun. Every step, we’re living the dream, but it’s just like the behind the scenes of [00:39:00] that is Yeah. Is interesting. And it’s something that I think there’s a lesson for all of us in which is you wanna make space for yourself outside of whatever you’re doing.
Because we’re not on this one year lurid sprint to try and release re like we just released Ream and it was a big year, but we’re just at the beginning of what this is. This is a decade plus journey into building re and a, creating this creator powered publishing platform and to creating a future where storytellers rule the world.
And that’s not something that just stops. So if we burn out, if we view it as this end point, as this destination you miss the point, which is the journey, but, it’s tough. You have to always really make that journey something that you enjoy. And I think we’ve done a good job at that, but we haven’t always done a good job at that.
And I think that’s probably true for everyone listening too.
Emilia Rose: Yeah, I agree. And that kind of goes back to we talked a lot about your [00:40:00] subscription isn’t a sprint, you’re not trying to get there as fast as you can. It’s a sustainable business and that’s how you have to build it as it’s going to, it’s gonna take time to build it very probab, sometimes very slowly.
Sometimes it happens really quickly. But it’s something that you wanna sustain for a long period of time. And that’s how we’re approaching it And,
Michael Evans: yeah. Yeah. No, I think it’s been really like the coolest thing ever. I feel like the luckiest person ever. And it’s because of all of you.
And I hope that we can just continue fostering this together because another one of our values is that community is king and you all have made this community so powerful and just one of the, one of the best things just to ever happen to me personally, and I think to all of us. And your community has the power to do [00:41:00] that for your readers.
I know that. And it has the power to do that for you. And I wanna share now 10 quick lessons before we talk briefly about Reams future. 10 quick lessons that I personally have learned this year. From Ream and there are kind of 10 like almost tweet takeaways that hopefully you all can use for your own business.
And the first one we’ve highlighted so much, but it’s worth sharing again, which is lesson number one, community and relationships are more powerful than advertising. I just finished a great book recommended to me by Joan Remand someone in our community. Joan, you’re awesome. I hope you’re listening. And it was called Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy.
Actually, that was the side title. The title is Belonging to the Brand by Mark Schaffer. And it was awesome book about how [00:42:00] everything’s really shifting towards community and. Not only is this a big macro trend, but it’s just more fun and it’s, it’s the way to be. Another thing we learned is less is more like Ream is a subscription platform, but you can only imagine all the requests that we’ve had from authors and we love the requests, the things that you have wanted to see us do.
All the different monetization methods and things we could enable and all these things could pot potential. You don’t know where the future is gonna go, but right now we really wanna do subscriptions. Great. We want to be the best subscription platform for fiction authors. Period, bar none. And at our launch date, we’ve already accomplished that, but only because we had laser focus.
If we focus on that, it may have been different. We may have actually had a halfway good thing in 10 different areas, which is science. I see the problem with authors when they don’t, when you don’t know your. Your niche when you don’t focus, which is another one of our lessons, [00:43:00] which is to stay focused, prioritize, and do one thing.
Great. Lesson number three, if you don’t stay focused, you run the risk of doing every marketing strategy halfway. You’re on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and all of it’s bled because you’re just trying to keep up with things. Instead, you could have done one thing and knocked it outta the park.
It’s more powerful to do it like that, and we’ve really tried to have that laser focus too, because like we’re all human, right? We can only do so much at once, and you do have to lean into that. You have to lean into your humanity, not work against it, and try and work yourself into the ground. With that, our fourth lesson was to focus on trust and making things sustainable.
We’ve talked a lot about that, but I think that speaks for itself. Lesson number five. Was to be principled in who you are creating for and why. And for us, this was just something [00:44:00] that we were like unbelievably clear about. From day one, I guess a little selfishly, me and Emilia were creating for ourselves.
We were creating for ourselves as authors wanting to make a better platform that we could be hard. So like we were creating for ourselves, but we also knew we weren’t just creating for ourselves, we were creating for all the people like us who happen to be fiction authors specifically. Mostly there’s other people in here, but Andy Fiction authors is really who we have our heart for, who we relate to the most.
People who wanna have freedom and control and have a direct relationship with their audience, be able to have a community. But we’ll call community focused fiction authors. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re into your tra, you come from any background, but that’s what we focused on, laser focused on helping that kind of author.
We love all authors. We love all people. We love all of you, but that’s who we were focused on and our why, which was that we believe that stories are what make life worth living. They give our readers meaning, they give our readers spaces of belonging [00:45:00] and in a digital age where increasingly people are feeling lonely, being able to bring and create spaces of belonging.
To be able to bring people together and be able to create real relationships with people powered by our stories is not just important. It’s a need. Like the world needs this, the world needs you, and we wanted to support you, our authors, to empower you, to build your own many Disneys, to build your own world.
And that’s just been so clear from us, from day one. And you don’t have to have your super clear vision and mission and your why on day one, but you do need it to sustain you. You do need to wake up and at some point every day be like, there’s a reason I’m doing this that has nothing to do with money, that has nothing to do with the next book.
That has nothing to do with the next thing to do. It has to do with this specific thing. And I think all of you have it, but stick true to it and don’t stray from it because it gets dangerous when you compromise on your why you can’t do that.
Emilia Rose: [00:46:00] Yeah I completely agree. And like tying in with your why and who you’re creating for is knowing your market audience or your target audience is so important, especially when you’re trying to solve like huge problem.
Like we are which is like fine, like indie authors or again, any author but specifically indies. We don’t have that space to connect really deep with our audience. There’s Facebook groups, but people get. Their account’s terminated. Like one of our friends has had his account terminated and he built so much up on Facebook and now it’s just gone.
And you can have all these like little things and you could be on all these different platforms, but there hasn’t been a space just for that’s worked. That’s just for you and your audience and your community. And so you really have to know who your target audience is and like the [00:47:00] purpose again, why you’re creating for them.
Michael Evans: It’s huge that the target market is tough because not all of us have one. And we do need to figure out our target reader. Another lesson as well is just to take care of yourself. Yes,
Emilia Rose: definitely. It’s so hard to get caught up in challenges or successes and sometimes you just need to take like a step back and just care about yourself and your body and your health and your wellbeing because in order to create a successful business, you have to be in a very healthy mindset in order for it to be sustainable over a long period of time.
Michael Evans: Yeah, no and the people that you love deserve the best version Yes. Of you and you need to be treating yourself the best in order to do that. Another lesson is that bigger is not always better. This [00:48:00] one. It’s tough because we can see ourselves wanting to run for the top of the charts and attack the biggest genre.
But this is something we’ve very firmly believed at subscriptions for authors and at Ream, which is that you don’t need to try and be the next great South American river. If you understand my reference to still change people’s lives as a publishing technology company and to make this industry move a step forward.
Yes, we have a vision. Yes we are ambitious and we want to do great things, but at the same time we know that doing the big thing going to the moon, the proverbial moon is not always the approach. And in fact, doing that small thing, serving that niche of people really is actually where.
You can often have a more successful business. Or as the saying goes, the riches are in the niches. And this goes very similar for authors. Grouper readers is underserved. That might not be the top charting next Hollywood blockbuster, [00:49:00] right? It might not be that, but it still can be. The thing that makes you sustainable living.
And the beauty of subscriptions is that it can actually help you go deeper with that niche, serve them, get paid more per reader, and actually make that more sustainable, more possible to serve niches of readers. So we believe that’s a really big thing to focus on. Bigger is not always better. Yes.
Emilia Rose: And going along with that and trying to find which genre is underserved or.
That could be applied to anything. But never stop learning. Like you constantly want to learn how to do maybe different business models or learn who your reader really is, or just it could be applied across the board, but never stop learning. Continue to grow.
Michael Evans: Yeah. No, that’s a big one. I think I started doing at my worst in my author career when I felt [00:50:00] like I stagnated is when I started going in circles and I wasn’t, I was doing so much and overwhelming myself so much that I wasn’t giving myself the space to learn.
Because you can learn by doing, but it’s also a mix as well. If you’re not giving yourself the space to reflect and actually digest, you’re just going to keep doing and doing, and it becomes almost machine-like. And. I just now am like, at a totally other extreme. I probably read like one and a half to two books a week because I’m just obsessed with trying to learn as much as possible so that this whole ream thing goes as well as possible and we could keep doing better for y’all.
And my reading list will have to be a talk for another podcast, but it’s something that I like found my love again for in the last year, my love again for reading, because I was so focused on doing that. I wasn’t actually reading for probably between my years of 18 and 20 and I lost two years of reading in my life and I never wanna do that again.
Yeah,
Emilia Rose: I have a similar story, but [00:51:00] yeah doing a author business full-time and writing full-time it’s really hard to find your time, like the time for yourself and the time for reading. Especially for me, it’s been really difficult to find that love of reading again, but just. Yeah I find my love of storytelling in other forms like anime and manga and TB now, but it’s always important to, to put your yourself first and to find that love of whatever you love, whatever you like doing again, after it’s probably been burnt out a little bit.
Michael Evans: Yeah. Yeah. And the last thing is to share your journey with others. This is something that I think we’ve done and yeah, it’s been probably the greatest thing we’ve have done. Sometimes I wish we shared even more of our journey and. [00:52:00] Being able to open up the world to sometimes our mistakes, our struggles, our victories, the things we’re thinking about, the things we’re happy about, the things we’re grateful for, and our lessons along the way is really a superpower.
And you can do that with your readers too. You can share your writing journey with them. Maybe that’s literally through early access, sharing that process as it unfolds. But that might be just sharing like some of the research that goes into your books. And that might not literally be like actual research, but what is the inspiration?
What is going into your stories? How is that process happening? What are that moments where you’re like, I wasn’t sure. Like your readers might be fascinated to learn oh, this is a moment when I hit a plot hole or when I hit a moment in the story that was like a dead end almost had writer’s block and this is how I work through it.
Those are things that your readers might be super interested just in seeing. Your process. So don’t discount that. Document it because you’re already doing it. If you just document the right moments, document the right thoughts you’re having, it becomes really easy, like to do it and it becomes something and it’s really valuable for others.[00:53:00]
Emilia Rose: Yeah, I agree. And it’s very freeing. So just like share like your journey and how you got to where you are or why you created a character a certain kind of way. And have people identify with that and be like, Hey, yeah, I’ve experienced the same things as an author, or, Hey, I really connect with this character because of this specific reason.
And that could be like the same exact reason why you created the character. And yeah, it’s really it’s really freeing to be able to do that.
Michael Evans: Yeah, no, without a doubt. And the final lesson, the bonus lesson is that, Working in teams is a superpower. So don’t discount your creative partners your fellow authors.
That’s the superpower. And I know for us, like if any one of us just decided to work on ream alone, like it would’ve never, ever happened. Oh, no, definitely not. There’s no way. So that’s the beauty of it. And with all of these [00:54:00] lessons and a little bit of our journey shared, just off the cuff, and I hope y’all enjoyed it, I wanna now just share a little bit about where Reams going for those of you as a treat for making it to the end and of this episode.
And we promise, by the way, this will be the only episode that’s all refocused, where we’re gonna be back to a regularly scheduled program. And maybe if we have a really big update in the future or some milestone to celebrate, we’ll come back on and talk more about re maybe for our 50th episode or our hundredth episode.
We can do these specials when we talk more about the journey and we’ll get there eventually. But for this episode, We wanna share a little bit about where Reams going, only because I get this question all the time and I just wanna upfront say, we do not have a public roadmap. We do not have a public roadmap.
Why? Why we do not is because we don’t want to set an expectation to you that we might change our roadmap, but adjust all the time internally. Literally, there’s a hundred different features and tweaks you wanna make to the site in there right now. A hundred. Yeah. And I [00:55:00] won’t wanna say it’s growing, it grows, but then things get knocked off the list.
So the point is that we do things on this combination of what is best for our team? What is our team aspire to work on right now? What is best for our company’s mission, for what we’re trying to do here, which is help you all build sustainable recurring revenue. That’s the most important, that’s our North Star.
And how we determine that is, okay, what are authors saying? What are they telling us? What is their feedback? And two, What is the data? What are we seeing? What are we seeing behind the scenes that maybe they’re not telling us around what is actually working for people? And the third kind of bonus thing would be what are things that we’ve been researching into that we know are working elsewhere that we know have worked for other businesses that we wanna give a shot and test out with our authors sorts of experiments.
So with that said we have a lot of really cool things that we’re gonna be working on in the background for years and years to come. And they’re gonna change a lot of how things [00:56:00] are done, I think, in publishing in a really beautiful way. But to bring it more towards near future more realistic things that you can expect from us going forward.
And this does not mean in the next 30 days. In fact, this is something I’d expect in the next year or so. Yeah. Is we’re gonna be launching audio. Which we’re really excited about audiobooks and support for web comics as well. So you’ll be to have serialized audio, you’ll be to have regular audiobooks, all that stuff on the site.
We’re also gonna be coming out with free tier slash following. So what this is that readers will be able to follow you, they’ll be able to get updates and some notifications around posts that you make that are public and they’ll be able to join your community and even make posts publicly. We’re gonna basically be able to build out your own mini Facebook group that you can use for free on re, you don’t even have to, if you’re not ready, set up your paid subscription, you can still set up your community on re.
That’s definitely a very near future we’re moving towards. And then the last big thing [00:57:00] is, Discovery. We have not optimized for that right now. We really are still focused on helping our early authors, which our early authors are now a lot more y’all, and we’re so excited to have you. But we’re really focused on connecting you with your existing readers.
But we’ve already seen readers ask about ways to find new books and find new stories and find new authors. And we’re gonna be building on a system that’s just the beginnings of that, but makes cross pollination between reams easier. And this won’t look like some big overarching algorithm, but will instead empower you as storytellers to count with one another and to share your world.
Because this shouldn’t be just one little ream. There should be like doors and pathways and secret trap doors in between the different worlds. So if you get my imagery, that’s what we’re thinking about. And the last thing, which is like. A big deal. And it’s a thing that will happen soonest and it’s a big deal cause it’ll help you all a lot is we have a lot of help guys live on the site now, but we’re gonna be coming out with some full walkthrough [00:58:00] tutorials that’ll be on YouTube totally for free, about how to use ream best practices, different ways to use features.
So you can expect that completed by the end of the summer, which we’re super excited for. So that’s those are the big things. I know y’all probably have a lot of other questions. We’ll have to leave you in suspense. We gotta have some plot twists in here. So we’ll save our plot twists for later.
We ha we only foreshadow here. We can’t give away the secrets, but it’s a Cliff Hager. Yeah, cliff Hager. I guess that’s where we leave him off. Like every great Sierra fictional, leave him off on a Yeah, exactly. Len, I’ll just end off and say this, don’t forget storytellers of the world and.
The really big thing that we are super excited for and the really awesome new update that we think will really change how your business works is.