Posted on June 23, 2023.
Mila is an amazing LitRPG author from Bulgaria writing under the pen name Alix Roche. In this episode, we chat about her struggles with monetizing her subscription and the pressure that comes with it.
Join the conversation about Mila’s Episode in the SFA Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/4829545823760825/posts/6225557280826332
Mila’s Links:
Mila’s website: https://magidexacademy.com/
Mila’s new release: https://mybook.to/magidex_academy
Join Ream, the subscription platform by authors for authors: https://www.reamstories.com
Join the waitlist for the next cohort of the Six-Figure Subscription Author Accelerator: https://learn.subscriptionsforauthors.com/subscriptions-for-authors-accelerator
#37 Episode Outline:
0:00:00 Introduction
0:03:52 Mila’s Origin Story
0:07:38 The Pressures of Subscriptions
0:08:48 Parallels in Mila and Emilia’s Story
0:11:05 Mila’s First Subscription
0:16:34 Helping Mila Deal With The Pressure of Subscriptions
0:17:40 Subscriptions As a Side Hustle
0:21:39 Keeping Writing Fun
0:26:27 Altering Your Expectations
0:30:53 Reflecting on Your Relationship With Your Readers
0:31:45 Finding Community as a Part-Time Writer
0:37:18 Conclusion
#37 Episode Transcript:
Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Subscriptions for Authors podcast. Today we’re gonna be talking all about a very important question. What if I only want to be an author part-time? I think in our community, and trust me, I’ve had this feeling myself. It’s the dream. We want to be full-time authors.
That’s most of the conversation in publishing How. Quit the nine to five, how can we make enough money to replace our day job? But Mila, our wonderful guest today, she has a bit of a different story, a bit of a different desire. She doesn’t want to be a full-time writer in this moment. That doesn’t mean I can’t change the future, but right now she’s not looking to be a full-time author, but she wants to write as her side hustle.
She already is, and she is making money from writing. She already has a publishing deal and she’s been able to find some great success. But she doesn’t want to make it her 40 hour a week job. She wants to still keep writing fun and keep it like the hobby that brought her to it in the first place.
But as we’re gonna discover, this doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to get paid for her work. She still wants to get paid [00:01:00] fairly for her work. So what does this mean? This means that starting a subscription, which Mila as a lid, r pg author on Railroad knows is. The most lucrative way that she could make money from her hobby and money that could change her life, but how does she approach it?
How does she have a subscription and that expectation that comes with it while still wanting to keep this part-time and still wanting to keep this fun? It’s a big question. It’s a hard one. And that’s what we’re gonna dive into today, and this is our first of a series of episodes that might just become a regular thing on the podcast, but I could tell you we have five authors on deck who are part of the Facebook group at subscriptions for authors, and we put out a call and wanted to see what are some struggles people have in subscriptions, what are some things that we can help with on the podcast live and that you all could help with in a convers.
So that’s why the title of this podcast is a question, because it’s a discussion we’re all gonna have together. It’s a discussion that we’re gonna be having live right now. But if you wanna help Mila, if you wanna join in on the conversation and offer your advice to [00:02:00] her, I encourage you to go to the Facebook group at facebook.com/descriptions for authors, and we’ll have a post there pinned in the group the week after you’re listening to this.
If it’s been. Week or two weeks or three weeks since this has been posted and you’re listening to this we’ll find some place in the groups that you can go find this post and read a little bit more about Mila’s story, a little recap of the podcast, and offer your advice maybe share similar struggles that you’ve been through and ask for advice from other people in the group.
We think this will be really fun, and we’re now creating this podcast as a community, so we’re gonna get right into this. I’m very excited and if you all are looking to actually get your subscription started, don’t forget to go to subscriptions for authors.com. And when you go to our site, we’ll send you a free book about how to get started and grow your subscription as an author.
But now let’s get into this incredible conversation with Mila. She’s unbelievably courageous to come on and chat about something like this with us, and we just had a ton of fun. This one’s gonna be special.
Mila, I’m very excited to chat with you today cuz I think we have a very important conversation that will help everyone here.
[00:03:00] And it helped me myself cuz this is something that I struggle with too, which is. Thinking about if and how we should monetize our stories and specifically subscriptions being something that is tricky because it’s a new model and it’s something that. Definitely can be worthwhile for us from a money standpoint.
But then how does that affect what our passion projects, we love to write, we may have been writing for years and not getting paid for it. And I wanna first ask you about your origins and fan fiction and the prior cereals that you’ve done. Cause I know right now you have successful cereal, which we’ll talk all about that and how you’re thinking about starting your subscription.
But talk to me about past Mila. What got you started in fan fiction and how was the last 10 years of you writing then?
I’ve always written because I wanted to, and I felt the need to tell my own stories, mostly because I didn’t feel like I was being represented the way I wanted to in fiction.
So I started writing fan fiction at 12 years old. And from then on I’ve been writing fan fiction nearly every single year for NaNoWriMo, I would win it [00:04:00] using fan fiction. It was something my English teacher actually recommended for me. To improve in English class. Since then I’ve been writing and for 10 years, most of my work was fan fiction.
It was free for everybody to read. And it was in this, serial kind of writing style where, we have the chapters and you upload a chapter every week, every day if it’s an event or some kind of challenge. And it was really fun for me. And when I started writing my own stories around two years ago, I wanted to do the same thing with them and serialization
really spoke to that and I felt it was the natural next step if I wanted to branch out and do my own thing because it fit my style with what I used to do and fan fiction. So I started doing that and I felt really guilty when I started my first Patreon. Because, and it puts such a pressure on [00:05:00] me because I was going to be paid for this.
And it dawned me that because fanfiction cannot be monetized, you can’t Yeah. Make money off of it. Even tips or anything like that, you can’t monetize. And it was just a pure hobby for me. And when my hobby started making me money, it changed my outlook on it, and I started feeling this pressure.
And I started hating the story that I was writing because I was getting paid to do it. So yeah, that was my biggest problem.
I first just wanna say that the reason why I was so excited to have this conversation with you is not only because you’re struggling with this, and I think it’s a really important conversation because you said that you feel like you’re one of the only ones in at least the Facebook group that is struggling with this.
And what I just want everyone listening, put a call out if you’re listening, you should go to our Facebook group. There’s a post in the Facebook group right now that. Basically has this podcast in it and we can all basically help Mila and have this conversation together around basically struggling [00:06:00] and not knowing how to charge or if we should charge for our subscription, this sort of passion and money, commerce and art, and where that kind of sits, how we can still maybe get paid for our passions and not encroach on that.
So I just wanna first say that, I’m sure you’ll find people comment on the post and know that you’re not alone in this. I think this is a very common thing. Myself, I never wrote fan fiction, but I feel like that’s weird to say because my first book that I wrote was literally basically inspired directly by Divergent Hunger Games.
And although it was like original fiction, just because it had my own characters, it was totally like I was in a fandom need to write and I didn’t. Even think about monetizing my books, even think about turning it into or publishing it, anything like that, until I had written like two full books and I didn’t even think about putting it online, like in a serial fiction platform.
I was too scared for that. I was just writing for myself, and then I felt the same thing when I actually put my work out in the world. As exciting as it was there was a lot more pressure. But I published my book, this is back in 2017, not on a subscription platform, not having my fans pay me monthly, but in an e-book retailer.
But you had mentioned that. [00:07:00] Charging a la carte for your books in the ebook retailer, or having even a traditional publisher offer you a book deal feels different than a subscription. Why do you think that is? Why does that a subscription feel different to you in terms of this monetizing problem?
I think it’s mostly cuz you know exactly who’s paying you.
Oh, this reader that is with me from chapter one, they were one of my first, followers on this platform. Let’s say they are now giving me money, supporting me, and you just feel like this additional pressure cuz it’s not done, you’re in progress writing it and posting it. And it’s daunting cuz you know you’re writing for those people as well, not just for yourself.
And also I think it’s the fact that it’s not finished as well. Cuz when you upload an ebook or get a deal from a publisher it’s the finished product. You put out the finished product. And if it’s a work in even if the chapters will not change if they’ve even been edited by an editor or something like that, even if it’s that kind of quality, it still [00:08:00] feels unfinished to me.
Those are the two things I feel are different in this regard.
Amelia, I know you had a similar story in writing on Wattpad, serializing your stories, and for a long time you were getting all these reads, but not monetizing anyway. How did it feel when you started your subscription and then also started to gain fans?
How was that journey for you? It was scary.
It was very scary. I have actually a very similar story to you. I started writing in middle school and I’m pretty sure it was like fan, like one direction, fan fiction. Cause I was like so obsessed with them. And so I used to write that a lot and read a lot of Alongside of that, I would read a lot on Wattpad .
And then when I started writing, I did I did start writing some fan fiction, but when I started like writing more seriously in college, I did my own kind of, Books and publish them on Wattpad and I would publish them. And I think my, one of my books got up like, to a few million views and I was, my husband was like, you have to monetize this.
And I was like, no, [00:09:00] I’m not monetizing it. I don’t want people to pay for my work. But he convinced me to try it out. And while I hated the fact that anyone had to pay for my work I like slowly figured out Hey, they don’t have to they, they can get early access if they want to, if they wanna support me, but I’m going to finish the book on Wattpad no matter what.
And I still finished the book on Wattpad no matter what today too. But it’s like I had to go through like a mindset shift. Like I’m not forcing anyone into my subscription. They’re there because they want to support me. They can choose to support me or they can choose not to support me in a monetary way.
They can choose to read the story just on my serial fiction platform, just on Wattpad for free. And that’s still support in my eyes. Just because they’re giving me cash doesn’t mean. Like them anymore. I appreciate them, but I appreciate all my fans and yeah. It was just something I had to definitely work my way through because it was really hard at first.
My husband had to [00:10:00] fight with me to even start on the subscription or anything,
I’m now wondering for you, Mila, if you want to share about the journey of your. Serial because I know right now the current problem is you have a cereal that’s doing well and that you could probably potentially start to monetize through subscription and start to, gain some monthly income, which seems like you say like almost the right thing.
The best way to monetize in your genre, which is railroad, is where you’re writing a lot. So that’s very much an ecosystem that supports that business model. Talk to me about how that first subscription went and that first cereal, and I’m guessing that first cereal ended. So share with me that story, how that went.
The story started when my brother actually he discovered Royal Road first. Okay. And he’s a little bit younger than me, but he’s very much into this new age reading, which is on the serial platforms and. He really enjoyed reading there. And he was like, it’s like Wattpad , but for like fantasy stories.
[00:11:00] Not that there were no fantasy stories on Wattpad. There are, and a lot of the royal road stories are also on Wattpad. Many people cross post them, but it’s more focused on that. And he told me, you should come read something. And I did. And I was already working on a story. It was mostly inspired by my brother because he really enjoys this type.
Fantasy stories, the progression fantasy with rpg kind of stories. He used to talk a lot about them, and so I took all of that and I was also getting into those kind of stories because of him, because he would tell me, oh, this is so good. You should get it. So I was like, my story that I’m writing on the side, it’s probably going to work.
And I had around 30 K words written already and. At that time there was this big author the First Fire. He has a very successful serial and he had a post about how. He got started, basically his whole [00:12:00] strategy and he was like, if you want to be successful, you can adapt my strategy.
Basically that post was, and I was like, sweet, I have a blueprint, I’m gonna try it. And so I wrote a little bit more and I started posting using that blueprint and in that blueprint, he said that you should start monetizing as soon as you get on one of the popularity lists on the platform. So when you get enough traffic to your story that it starts picking up.
And I did just that, but that’s when everything crashed for. Because first of all the only platform I knew about monetizing was Patreon. And Patreon is very finicky with how you do early access. And just the time it took me to get the chapters onto. Patreon and schedule them and keep track.
In my Excel sheet of which chapter went into which tier one really started [00:13:00] to weigh me down. And then when I started getting my first people on Patreon, it started getting real. Yeah. And Then I also had this burnout moment. And it was physical burnout. My wrists got inflamed and I had a backlog of course, but my wrist got inflamed and I could not write.
I have to write a lot for my job as well. So I could barely write for my job with my inflamed wrists. So I was out of commission. I couldn’t write my serial for two weeks. And that’s when I discontinued my Patreon because I just felt like it was unfair. For my subscribers that I was not keeping up and I swore off doing that again.
Because I just felt like it was a failure and right as I canceled that, I got my deal with my publisher, so awesome. It felt like, oh, I can just do that. I don’t have to monetize it with a subscription. I can just take the deal with the publisher. And that’s what I
did.[00:14:00]
First of all, like congratulations on we always talk about like just getting your first paid subscribers is a huge deal, but then also off the back of that, being able to get a publishing deal that’s, it’s great. It’s really awesome.
But, it’s interesting cuz , I totally feel you, when you say like the word failure, like it feels like in a way you failed because, you had a promise that you made to your fans. How many chapters were you serializing for them a week? Was it one chapter, two chapters a week?
How much were you giving them per week? Every
single day. At least every single day. Yeah. One chapter every single
day. How long were these chapters? Because progression, fantasy can be a bit longer, right?
The chapters were on the shorter side for me. Shorter side mostly 1,500 words okay. It wasn’t a lot.
But towards the end of the serial I had longer chapters, mostly because, the end always. Yeah. Tying everything together was always,
Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. That’s a lot of chapters that you’re releasing in a week, and obviously when you make that promise to be there for your readers almost every day [00:15:00] basically, and then you aren’t there for two weeks or aren’t able to, it’s the better way to put it.
That makes you feel like this subscription thing is too much pressure. I imagine like those two weeks, you’re pretty stressed out, like what already wasn’t a fun time, was made a horrible time because you were. My readers are waiting for me. They’re paying me right now, and I can’t
do this. Yes. And I was even typing on my phone, trying to write even through those two weeks just to get something out.
But it was not good for me. A few of the later chapters I feel like weren’t up to my standards, which of course I fixed later on. It’s just so I could, keep my promise. And it was a lot.
So what’s interesting about this, just hearing your story, is that, on the surface it sounded.
Because it was this whole issue of this is a passion project and now I’m getting paid for it, and now there’s all this pressure. But diving deeper, it seems like it’s more than just the transfer of money from fan to you. If I was to ask you, what if you just had a tip [00:16:00] jar with no sort of promise at all and you ended up making a hundred dollars a month just in tips, random tips from your fans on the internet?
How would that make you feel?
I’d still feel guilty. Just because I’m used to people getting everything for free and not just in that way. It’s just, I can’t really describe it. I feel like this is a hobby for me, and if I make it a job, it will start to weigh on me.
And that’s scary.
Do you want it to be a job? Or do you wanna just have it as a hobby? Because you could have it as a hobby. There’s nothing
wrong with Yeah. No, I don’t know. I don’t like using this word, but the side hustle mentality.
Monetizing your hobbies is one of those, one of the things that is really. Ingrained in me and I feel like in my generation as well and the people around me as well, because everybody’s oh, you don’t want to be wasting your time.
And because I’m a creative person and I can’t just sit down and watch shows after work or something like that, I want [00:17:00] to create something. I feel that extra need to be creating something, and I want to share it with people. But when it comes to monetizing it it’s this battle between the passion and the side hustle kind of mentality
Super interesting cuz I’ve actually seen a number of YouTubers cuz you’re, we’re all basically, and we’re all in the same generation and. Basically growing up almost internet native, right? But from the day we were born, essentially I don’t remember a day in my life where the internet didn’t exist and that I wasn’t using it, which is scary, but it’s basically true.
And I see people now YouTubers who were trying to once and were making a full-time living. An example is Jed. He’s a of logger. He lives in New York City now, I believe, although he’s hopped around and he was a software engineer. Quit his job, become a YouTuber, made a full-time living as a YouTuber, did very well, but that felt like for him, it took the passion out of YouTube and it became this sort of thing where, YouTube was the thing for fun in his life that he would do after work.
And [00:18:00] yes, he happened to get paid for it, but then YouTube became his work and it was his entire life, and what he chose to do was still do YouTube, but actually go get another full-time job and make YouTube more of that part-time thing. The less pressure on having to have next month’s entire income come from it and working on it as like you suggest.
A side hustle. What’s interesting is we don’t talk about this like in the author community, we think of it as a binding or you fail and you make no money or you are a full-time author. But I think increasingly there’s this middle road that is healthy. So yeah. What do you think about that, Amelia?
I was just gonna say I relate to your story a lot, because my writing definitely it was all passion. But as it turned more into a business, like I still have passion for writing, but the passion wasn’t as fierce as it was right in the beginning.
I can’t sit down anymore and just write a passion story. It’s really hard for me to just sit down and be like, all right No, my audience isn’t gonna like it, but I really wanna write this story. I can’t do that. [00:19:00] And I think it’s because I have that mentality too. Everything I write, everything I do creatively, I have to monetize, which is it’s really hard and it’s really tough to like just live like that.
Like everything I do has to be monetized. Yeah I just wanna say, I really relate to that and sometimes it’s completely okay to have this as a hobby and just do it as a hobby. And it doesn’t have to be this , full blown business where you’re bringing in like millions of dollars a year, like some authors are you can do it for fun
so I think we also need to normalize the idea that like nothing is forever and there’s always this idea, like once an author makes the jump to full-time, cuz I’ve seen this happen before and it’s not something people publicly talk about too often, but people feel like a failure.
When, you might actually go back to your day job and still be writing, but you’re not a full-time author anymore. And it feels like to that person, in this culture that we have in publishing wow, you made it and then you dropped off. But in reality, when you end up working for yourself and running your own writing business, Hopefully it becomes the [00:20:00] dream job, but it still is a job.
At the end of the day, you have to do these certain things. You’re not gonna love everything about it, whether it’s taxes or like you were suggesting. Certain platforms make uploading and spreadsheets really challenging, and at the end of the day, people switch jobs. So that could mean that you switch your writing business around and switch genres, switch how you’re running things.
But that also might mean that you work another job entirely and you can still do this writing thing. So I guess what I would encourage you is if you’re feeling right now, like you want this to be your hobby, you don’t have that burning desire cause you quit your job. Don’t do the nine to five anymore.
And go full-time if that’s not your burning desire. But your burning desire is to write stories, and yes, I agree with you. It would be nice to get paid with it. My first advice would be proudly embrace that, and make that your goal in everything you do. Your North Star is to make this still your hobby.
You have boundaries around keeping this fun because what you don’t want to do is have the nine to five and then a 10 to 12 or a five to 12, two [00:21:00] jobs. That’s the nightmare. So we need to figure out how we can help you keep this fun, but also, I believe you believe this as well. You do deserve to get paid for your work.
It would be nice to have some extra income. Am I right in suggesting that?
Yeah I wanted to have this talk mostly because I feel like if I were to make it, I feel like it’s one of those fear of success as well has a part in this because.
Just having the thought of, okay, I could potentially make, actually, pretty easily because of where I live and the cost of living in my country, I could easily make what I make at my day job writing fiction, just like if I released my fiction self-published it or just had the ebooks there.
So it feels like it could happen, but. If I made it, it would suck the passion out of it. Thinking, oh, I’m in this box forever now because I have this audience to [00:22:00] please. With my writing, I’m not writing for myself anymore because fan fiction is really self-indulgent, and now I feel like with my original fiction, I cannot be as self-indulgent, if that makes sense.
You have
to write to market. That’s obviously the way that they think about and
not even the market is just writing for other people to enjoy. Yeah, because fan fiction is more self-indulgent and yes, people are also going to read this, but. They’re not reading it for you or for your characters, they’re reading it for the characters that you share, right?
Yeah, that’s also the other side of this.
so something I do I know my audience like something specific. They like specific stories and so this is just an example. I have a story that I know I can make it so they like it, but it wouldn’t stay true to the story itself, and I wouldn’t enjoy it as much.
So what I do is, I set aside time every day and it’s sounds really stupid, but I have this one room I go into and I just listen to music and just think about my plot of that story. And [00:23:00] I just live in that world for an hour or two every single day. I like never end up writing the story.
I could use that time to write. But I just live in that world and live in those stories that I don’t know if I wanna share with the rest of the world or rest of my audience. So something that you could do is Set aside time every day. Like even if it’s 15 minutes to just write what you actually wanna write that doesn’t please anyone else.
Like it pleases you and something inside you says, I have to write this specific story, I’m going to write it for myself and I don’t have to post it anywhere. It doesn’t have to be like where I’m forcing myself to show it to all my fans and all my readers. It’s just for you. So that could be potentially something that if you have an extra 15, 20 minutes every day that you could dive into alongside of your writing for everyone else.
Yeah,
I think that’s a really great idea. I haven’t thought about, just taking this and just, taking back, the. Hobby in the
Yes, you need to do that. If you want [00:24:00] to keep it as a hobby. And a hobby that you can also make money from. You have to have a boundary where this is at your nine to five job, you probably don’t have your boss say for Hey, hour, two hours today we’re gonna have fun and do whatever we want.
Like maybe that’s like the Christmas party or once a year, right? But it’s work and you’re driving the goals of an organization that you know you might love and you might agree with. You might even get to set some of those goals, or you might not. That’s, whatever your job is when it comes to your writing, you do get to set those goals.
Those goals are oftentimes, dictated or impart a conversation with readers, but that’s great. So that can then have this illusion of, But in reality, if you’re always trying to drive these goals at the end of the day to try and get your work paid to try and write a thousand words now or whatever that sort of output is, the fun is now gone.
And I think what you can do, regardless of whether this is your day job, where you do actually do it eight hours a day, or whether this is your maybe part-time side hustle that you do 15, 20 hours a week, a lot is. Segment of it, like Amelia said, maybe an hour a day, 20 minutes a day that you’re having fun.
You have to keep it fun. But then the other thing I would say is [00:25:00] that you are already talking about writing a chapter a day in your subscription, because I’m thinking back to now different ways of monetizing, and now I deeply understand why. Monetizing an ebook. The finished product is something that you’re saying feels more comfortable because the pressure of that that was already created.
It’s out there. And the great thing about books is it’s almost evergreen in a sense. You have the back list, now it’s added to the back list. If someone wants to buy it, that’s great. You don’t mind making special money from that. But you also recognize that in your genre, and for many authors, listening, subscriptions can be a very lucrative thing and also make the hobby more sustainable.
You don’t wanna have a hobby where you’re losing money to have the hobby, a lot of money paying and covers and editing. So it’d be nice to have the hobby be self-sustaining at a fair minimum. I understand that, but you are talking about this. Five chapters a week sounds almost like a full-time job keeping up with that.
So I wonder if, thinking about this expectation you set of yourself, but also the expectation then that your readers have in you, if there’s a way to make this much more like a hobby and the expectations that you set rather than a [00:26:00] full-time job.
I agree. I’m gonna add what you could do is.
You could do it so you release like two or three times a week. But if you wanted to keep that five days a week, what you could do is write a book ahead. So you write an entire book that you have. You might have three months worth of content if you’re releasing every single day.
And that way you’re a book ahead. You’ve written it as like your hobby, like you’ve done it because you wanna do it, and you’re not pressured to , have to write every single day. And so the book is already done. You post one chapter at a time and then you start writing the next book while it’s posting.
And then now you’re three months ahead or however long ahead you are. And. It could come back to stop feeling like, oh my gosh, I have to get this book out right now. I have to get this chapter, or I have to write and write. It becomes more of oh, I really love doing this. This is so cool.
I get to, once the book is finished, I get to share it with my subscribers and then publish it in like on retailers and stuff.
And to take that step further because I am still remember. Your story of two [00:27:00] weeks, the stress of the hands inflaming, and then not being able to keep up with the chapters.
Amelia, what she’s saying is brilliant because it solves the problem of in the middle of the book, in the middle of the action where the readers just anticipate that next chapter. You cutting them off. Even if a reader we’re all human, even if we understand that, it’s sad, it’s frustrating, and you feel that pressure and anticipation regardless of the expectation you set.
But so what you could also do, Let’s say it takes you three months to then serialize that book that you had pre-written, that you had already have done. If you now set the expectation that, oh my God, I have to now finish book two, while that’s being done, you now have another deadline that you’ve created for yourself inadvertently.
So what you can instead do, and this is a PSA to you and everyone else, you can actually pause your subs. After that season finishes so that your readers will stop charge. You can literally pause your subscription and if you are with us, just email me and Amelia if you have this question and I’ll help you do it if you’re on Reem.
But basically what you could then do is have a season model, right? Where Netflix doesn’t tell you oftentimes when a new Season’s gonna come out before that New Season’s created, right? They don’t just plot out, here’s the six [00:28:00] season. For this new TV show and we just dropped one. You could expect season two.
That’s season three. You have no idea. Now, of course, Netflix has a lot of other shows and you’re gonna keep having to pay them $10 a month or whatever. You pay them a month regardless. But for you as an author, you might feel like, if I’m not giving my readers anything for maybe a month, three straight months, six straight months, because I don’t have it ready yet, you have the right to not charge your readers.
And the good thing is that your subscription can actually be. So that your readers aren’t charged, and then when you’re ready, you can turn it back on.
Just an idea. I don’t know if this is resonating. What do you think about.
Yeah. I kind of , I did something similar with my second story. As in I started I’m not posting one chapter every single day anymore. I’m still posting the same amount of words per. Week though, just because it just falls like that.
I’m only posting two chapters a week, but my chapters this time around are between four and six each. Just because the story works like that. It’s more of a serial in the type of like TV show, like one [00:29:00] episode of cereal. It just feels The story just works like that. And I feel like having two chapters, even though they have such a bigger word count and it’s still the same kind of word count that I was doing with my first serial and now my second serial, it feels more manageable when you say it’s two chapters and for some reason they come out easier, which feels like it shouldn’t be working, but it’s working. And the thing about having a book ahead. Yeah I really wish I waited for that. But if I do it again, I would probably write more ahead just to have that buffer. If something happens. And the seasonal approach, I’ve actually seen people do it now that I’m more experienced now that I’ve taken the break between the two serials and studied more of what other authors were doing, not just using one author’s blueprint that I’d found, which was stupid of me to do.
But you live and you learn. And yeah this really resonates with me [00:30:00] in that if it’s not what the readers are currently reading, and I have the buffer and maybe even the comments of people won’t be affecting what I’m writing as much I feel like, but not that they’re affecting much.
Most people are very supportive and I haven’t had anyone really poke anything. That would be painful, let’s say about the story, but yeah I really see that as something that is great advice. Yes.
I think that’s a really good reflection too on your relationship with your readers. Cuz it’s interesting cuz for some authors, the chapter by chapter release, like having it almost co-created with their readers is part of the fun.
Which in that situation, the advice that we just offered probably wouldn’t be as helpful for an author in that situation. I can sense that this feels comforting for you then. I’m thinking this is definitely a good path as always with any advice, right?
It’s almost about being the filter of knowing what will work best for you. And sometimes you have to do it through this trial and error. But I would just encourage you to definitely be proud of the lessons that you’ve learned so [00:31:00] far. You’ve come a long way and you definitely. Although it might feel silly to look at one author’s blueprint and just follow that, you will learn your own blueprint over time.
For sure. I’m still very proud of you for seeing that and having the courage to get started. I think that’s incredible.
Thank you for saying that. It feels very validating to my experience.
You’re going on the right path, and my biggest advice is when you sit down to make a decision. Any decision in your writing business since we know our North star now, which is we wanna keep this fun and a hobby for now, right?
That can change, so don’t always be dead set in that. But what you should always do is give yourself the space to reflect on that and give yourself the space every time before you make a decision of, am I starting a new serial or am I gonna, increase or decrease my writing output? Whatever that decision is, run it.
Is this going to keep this fun because. You don’t have to maximize for profit, right? Money will be a byproduct. This money will be nice and that will be great. You deserve to get paid for your work, but you don’t wanna [00:32:00] have to think about, okay, there’s this author that I’m looking up to who makes $500,000 a year.
Let me take their model and then run it myself. It’s like that author is taking 5,000 a year, is probably doing it full-time. They might not even be having fun. You have no idea if they’re having fun anymore. And their life might not be the life that you want to live right now. So there might be some lessons there, but you really wanna make sure, okay, who are these?
Like who are the fellow hobbyist creators who are still making good money doing this, but who are having fun and doing it as a side hustle? There’s actually more people out there who are in your position than who made it big. There’s more successful hobbyist graders than there are full-time authors who are at the top of the charts.
The problem is we only see those big ones. Search deeper and keep finding people like who are in your genre, your sub genre, who might be on a similar journey. Cuz I think the biggest breakthrough moment will be for you when you can find two or three friends who probably won’t live in the same country.
So they’ll probably all over the world, that’s the beauty of it, but who have the same mission, who have the same vision for themselves at this point in their career. Because as much as this conversation, I’m sure is helpful, It’s very [00:33:00] hard to have to every day go through it. And even though you’re not alone, feel like you’re alone.
That’s the hardest part.
Yeah. I just feel like whoever I meet, most of the people, their goal is to make it full-time as soon as possible, at least in circles that I’ve been. They are striving for that, and I’m not. Even though I would say that I’m a very big information geek. I like to dig deep into the platforms and think about, all of those decisions which a full-time author would be doing.
You would be researching, doing all that, all of this business research and market research and all of that. And I’m doing that, but I’m not doing it in the business sense. I’m doing it because I like knowing stuff. While I feel like those friends that I’ve made because of my research and because of that, they all are on the.
On the path of, oh, I want to make this full-time as fast as possible. So what you said really made me think, oh, I [00:34:00] need to find the people that are not as interested in this, but are having just fun with this.
It’s the happy medium because I don’t think in any of this, and you’re not saying this, But I wanna be clear to everyone listening, it’s not, oh, okay.
We don’t care about making money. We don’t want our stories to perform. We don’t wanna reach readers. Like that’s, it’s not saying that it’s not saying it’s, we want to reach readers, we want our stories to do well. We want them to be out in the world. And then to be as awesome as possible, we wanna learn the best practices.
But we don’t want it to be our entire life. We want it to still be that fun hobby. And it’s fun to figure these things out. It’s fun to reach readers and keeping it that, and keeping the stakes in the world of fun and that, there is money involved and that could be great, but it’s fun when it’s the side hustle.
It’s like this is a very different side hustle than doing something like Uber Eats or things like that. Very different side hustle. Very different. I can speak from experience. I’ve talked to people who are Uber Eats delivery drivers full-time, some family members. That is actually a very tough position to be in, and it could be a very tough job.
There’s a lot of stress on yourself on the car, and it might not it. Some people might have fun in [00:35:00] it for sure. A lot of people might, and they’re doing an important job. So thank you to anyone who’s out there doing. Driving and on these roads that could be dangerous. People are texting and driving. It’s chaotic.
So thank you if you’re out there doing that. But my uncle, very good friend of mine, he was doing it full-time for six months and he really struggled. And what he thought would be, oh, I get to work for myself, this will be great. Wasn’t so fun. But now he does it more as a side hustle. He got a new job and he’s doing it maybe one or two nights a week, and for him it’s a fun way to put extra money in.
He actually likes driving around and listening to music, and he likes seeing new places in the city that’s fun for him. At that 10 hours a week, some extra money, the stakes aren’t, oh my God, if my car tire blows out, or the car wears down, that it’s all gonna break down. This is my only income source.
It’s just a. And he’s not at all saying he wants to drive around for free and deliver food either. So I know it’s a weird analogy, but I think it’s a helpful one because it, as artists, we somehow always can, get caught up in these extremes. But we need to find the people in the center for you, which goes to this call of action.
If you’re listening to this right now, you should go to our Facebook group. [00:36:00] facebook.com/subscriptions for authors. There’s gonna be a post in there. It’ll be pint if you’re reading this, like the week that it’s been released. And please mention if you’re a hobbyist author, a hobbyist subscription author I think that’s what we’ll call it for now.
We might need a better name for it, but I think we need more people who feel the same way that Mila. Just sharing those feelings and the comments that pose, we’d love to share that and bring you all together. And maybe there could even be a mini writers group or meetup setup so that you all can actually connect and meet each other.
Because even if they’re not all on Royal Road, people on Wattpad, people who are in Ken Unlimit, people who are all different paths, I think we all have something to learn from each other. And I think it’s very brave that you came on here to share this today because it has to be hard when you feel like.
In this weird gray area that no one else is in. But I relate to that cause I feel like I’m always in the gray area of my life and I just encourage you to keep embracing it. That’s where the beauty is.
You put it really well. I don’t think I have anything to add to that.
And that wraps up the conversation. It was our first time doing a non-interview conversation with the guest. So I’m very [00:37:00] curious for y’all’s feedback because I think this sort of open conversation where, you know, me and Amelia, we don’t really at all know where it’s going into it. We just know we have one problem we wanna start to help.
Kind of a live coaching call is the idea. So I hope you all enjoy that. And like us at the beginning of the podcast, please go to the Facebook group and the posts that we have pinned about Mila in there so that you can maybe offer your advice to Mila and share your story if you’ve been through something similar.
And we’ll keep doing these. We have four or five more scheduled in the next few months. And keep your eye out in the Facebook group. We’re gonna probably be doing another call to invite more authors onto the podcast sometime towards the end of the summer, which I know is a bit from now, but we’ll be doing this every few months.
We’ll do a call and we’ll pick a few more authors that the community votes on, so this is going to be a lot of fun. I hope you enjoyed this. It’s really special for us. And if you want more subscriptions for authors first of. We come out these episodes basically every week. So if you wanna help us be able to keep producing these episodes, [00:38:00] share this with a friend that you think would enjoy it.
We’re trying to create the podcast that’s talking, not just about subscriptions in and of itself in terms of making. But the subscription lifestyle, the subscription ethos as an author, and really this industry that’s going to be shifting more and more towards this model. We wanna help you not only connect more deeply with your readers, but also connect more deeply with yourself so we can all live healthier, happier, better lives as authors and hopefully wealthier too.
We want to, we wanna help you make more money. So that’s the idea. I hope you enjoyed this one. Anyways, that’s enough for me.
I’ll see you all in the next episode. In the meantime, hope you have an amazing rest of your day. And don’t forget, storytellers rule the world.