Posted on July 13, 2023.
Can we help an author with 20 paying subscribers increase her membership to 100+ paying readers per month? In this episode, we sit down with fantasy author Elizabeth Kirke to see if we can help her develop a marketing strategy to supercharge her subscription growth.
Elizabeth’s Links:
Elizabeth’s Website: https://elizabethkirkebooks.com/
Elizabeth’s Subscription: Ream and Patreon
Elizabeth’s Facebook Post:
Watch the recording of the 2023 Subscriptions for Authors Summit: https://subscriptionsforauthors.com/the-subscriptions-for-authors-summit-2023/
Join the waitlist for the next cohort of the Six-Figure Subscription Author Accelerator: https://learn.subscriptionsforauthors.com/subscriptions-for-authors-accelerator
#40 Episode Outline:
0:00:00 Introduction
0:03:32 How to Make Subscriptions a Bigger Part of Your Income
0:12:11 What’s helped So Far?
0:22:48 Enhancing Subscriber Experience
0:26:44 Arranging Tiers
0:28:46 Elizabeth’s Current Marketing Strategies
0:29:45 Michael’s Marketing Suggestions
0:41:18 Waves of Launching
0:47:50 Conclusion
#40 Episode Transcript:
This is gonna be a fun podcast cuz we’re gonna help an author who already has 20 paying subscribers each month, which is a tremendous start. But the thing is, subscriptions still represent a small portion of her overall income. So she wants to grow her subscriber base from 20 to hopefully 100 and even hundreds of paying subscribers a month.
So how did she do this? Well, That’s exactly what we’re gonna be talking about today in this edition of the Subscriptions for Authors Coaching session. These are totally free coaching sessions that we’ve done with the community because we have a lot of people who have [00:01:00] been asking us questions very specific to their subscriptions.
And instead of just highlighting success stories on the podcast or actionable tips and advice, which we’re still gonna do, we wanna start a series where we could bring the CUNY together and help folks who are at different stage of their subscription journey get to the next level. So that’s what me and Amelia did in this series.
This is interview just between me and Elizabeth. I ask a lot about her career. And a lot about her subscription business. And together we come away with some strategies that can really help her boost her subscription. So that’s our goal here to 10 X her subscription because she’s already doing well, but we want to help it grow a lot more.
Now, if you wanna join the journey with us and actually help give Elizabeth some advice, one, listen to this podcast all the way through, cuz you’re gonna learn a lot and you’re gonna learn a lot about Elizabeth’s story. But when you get to the end in the Facebook group, we have a post. It’ll be pinned for this week where you’ll be able to offer Elizabeth some advice after listening to this podcast.
Maybe you have some [00:02:00] additional questions and we can offer our advice on how to help you, and ultimately, we together can try to help Elizabeth grow her subscriber base from 22 Well Beyond and also can help you. So that’s the goal of Today podcast. I hope you enjoy it. And if you’re just getting started with your description and you’re like, whoa.
I don’t have 20 paying subscribers as an author. Don’t worry. You’ll get there. And everything we do in this podcast in the Facebook group, in the blog is designed to help you get there. But if you’re looking for something to really supercharge your journey and really kickstart you in an awesome way, then I recommend setting up for a mailing list@subscriptionsforauthors.com, and you’ll get sent a free book called Subscriptions for Authors, which will help you.
Start and grow your subscription. As an author, there’s so many ways to have a subscription. You know, you can have a subscription. As a KU author, as traditionally published author, writing serial fiction, we’ve seen authors be successful in many different genres. Subscriptions are less about one particular strategy and more [00:03:00] and overarching business model with tons of different strategies, tactics, and things you can offer within it.
So that’s what makes subscriptions fun. There’s a whole world out there. And in the end, we wanna make subscriptions work for you and be sustainable for your life, your readership, and your business. Today. We’re gonna help Elizabeth get there, and this one’s gonna be fun. Let’s get into this.
Michael Evans: what we’ll start with is, Elizabeth, you’ve been doing so many things in the author world for a long time, and specifically subscriptions or something that you’ve been doing for years at this point. Yeah, it’s been a while. You want to see it be a bigger part of your income.
So that’s our mission today. How can we help you take your subscription that already has fans? You already have over 20 readers paying you monthly, which is awesome by the way, and how can we get that to be a bigger portion of your income, [00:04:00] which, I guess to talk about that, let’s first get the full picture of your income streams as they stand now, and I can almost guess what those biggest income streams are, but tell me
where’s your money coming to be?
Elizabeth Kirke: Coming from Amazon. Okay. Mostly Amazon. I’m, I am wide, so I’m getting, yeah. And the, I’m happy to say that the, Barnes and Noble and Apple and stuff are becoming a bigger slice of the pie, but it’s still mostly Amazon. It’s probably the monthly, and then somewhere in the middle I guess would be the subscriptions.
Not high, but they’re like above, subscribed where I make $5 a month cause like
Michael Evans: bought a book. So
Elizabeth Kirke: they’re but they’re definitely well below the royalties.
Michael Evans: Yeah. So it’s not like a baby income stream, but it’s not something, some kids, so if you like, were to put together all the retailers and then your subscription. Yeah. There’s a pretty big gap. Yeah, definitely. And then I do wanna ask, so yeah, within the breakdown between formats Where are you seeing dominant and e-book? Is that where most of your readers are purchasing? Yeah. You’re mostly, they’re
Elizabeth Kirke: mostly e-book. Okay. I have several I need to make [00:05:00] in pa put in paper back, so hopefully once I do that’ll come up.
And then I’m I’m in an experiment where most of my audiobooks are actually on YouTube. Yeah. I, that, that gets monetized. There is zero income coming from YouTube, but the end goal there is subscribers as well,
Michael Evans: okay. I’m seeing the map of things and it would be interesting talk about how the YouTube experiment has gone for you because I feel observing the author community you, in the last year or so, there was like a number of success stories Yeah.
Of like people who did really well on YouTube. And then I feel like a ton of authors started to try it. And has that worked for you? Are you excited about how that’s gone so far in terms of posting audiobooks on YouTube? I
Elizabeth Kirke: am. I was okay. I was hoping for more, like you need a thousand subscribers to be monetized.
And 4,000 watch hours and 4,000 watch hours. I got the watch hours within six weeks. But the cuz they’re audio books, an iPhone that’s six hours long, so I got those that really fast. But then the the subscriber number crept up to 400 over the course of a few months and it just stayed there.
But three [00:06:00] of them are stuck in an exclusive contract with Audible, so I can’t put them on YouTube and I’m actually seeing a small uptick in sales from those. So it’s definitely, there are definitely people, who are listening to them on YouTube and they’re excited enough that they’re going out and they’re buying it I didn’t realize that you had to have subscribers to get monetized by YouTube. So I feel like there’s probably a lot of people who listen and they just don’t realize oh, if I click subscribe, it’s actually
Michael Evans: gonna help someone out.
In the beginning it really does. Yeah. There’s, it’s,
Elizabeth Kirke: there’s a lot I find in the author meanwhile that I didn’t know as a reader and I’m like, wow, if only more readers knew that it would be a
Michael Evans: game changer. People would, people wanna help out. It’s interesting about, YouTube in particular because they used to not run ads on smaller channels.
That weren’t monetized yet, but now they’re running ads Yeah. On it. So they start it’s a little interesting that they have that cut off. I understand why they do. Yeah. There’s multiple reasons why they do. Yeah. But okay. So that’s interesting. And now we have your subscription, and. Tell me when [00:07:00] exactly you launched it, like the point of your career you launched it at and why, what was the goal when you first launched it? Yeah. For
Elizabeth Kirke: up, for my first subscription on Patreon, I think it was just I’d heard about people using it and I actually just like serendipity.
I was hanging out with someone who makes her living as a YouTube host. And she had started a Patreon. We were talking about it and she was like, starting next month they’re gonna change, like how they do things, but if you start it now, you get grandfathered in to the old way. And that was like my, I was like, oh, I better do it, so I don’t, so I don’t get stuck in the new one.
And that was like my push. And that was spring? It must have been 2018. Yeah, I think it must have been 2018 because we. We were at a we were at a sailor, we were at the premiere of the Live Sailor Moon debut in in the United States. And there were no masks. So it had to be pre, had to be pre 20, 20,
Michael Evans: 20 18.
Sounds right.[00:08:00] That’s when they upped up their rates Yeah, that’s, yeah. For their fees. Yeah. And they ended the founding Yep. Creator program. Yeah. So it must 18, they’ve had a lot of different experiments in terms of like percentage fees and the different creator tiers.
I’m glad you’re a founding. Yeah. So I
Elizabeth Kirke: crater there. I slipped in like with a month spare.
Michael Evans: Yeah. If you’re gonna basically get a lifetime discount Yeah. Why not just create the account? Exactly. Yeah. See what happens. So that was
Elizabeth Kirke: like my, I’d been thinking about it for a while, but like talking to her and hearing her strategies and then.
Knowing there was a deadline, that was my push to
Michael Evans: go ahead and do it. And when you did do it, so right now, cuz I’m curious to see how your goals for your subscription have evolved. Yeah. Because in the beginning your goal was what, and now I’m pretty sure I know your goal, but if you had to tell me your desired dream outcome Yeah.
For your subscription, what would that beginning and then after or now
Elizabeth Kirke: picture. I think in general, when you do something like that, you probably always wanna make decent money off it. But you had an essay about this recently.
I was just reading that just the community with your readers. And one of the new things I [00:09:00] added since starting Ream is a perk that I’m hoping to get a little more interaction with. Cuz I don’t wanna just be posting and talking at people like it’s a blog cuz it, it is a community. My, my end goals I guess are I do wanna make a little more money off it so it can be more sustainable and I can, get the readers more things and, take more time to do writing because I’m making more from it.
But also I would like it to be a community where people are commenting and interacting and all cuz I, I do so much world building and background info. I’d love for people to be there driving it and saying this is what I wanna know about and this is what I want you to write and talking to each other.
Kind of like little book club, but
Michael Evans: okay. No, I love
Elizabeth Kirke: it. Yeah. And bigger too. I’d like I would, yeah, like more subscribers. Just let,
Michael Evans: I think we need to actually dive into how much bigger in a sense of like the scale of it because there’s. Just for everyone listening, I think you’re in a unique position that, you know, e everyone who everyone we talk to is at a different stage of subscription career.
Yeah. So someone is just starting their subscription and also [00:10:00] just starting their career. My kind of always advice to them is, everyone needs goals and you should have some sort of goal tied to the number of readers or something. But you wanna hamper those a little bit because you don’t really know if this is gonna be your genre yet, if you’ve been found your target readership you have No, I You’re in the beginning of experimental phases.
You’re well beyond that. You’re established already, so you have existing business already. And what I’ll ask you, I’ll ask you in these terms, what would be your goal? Let’s say, whatever your overall pie a hundred percent of the income is, what do you want that subscription revenue portion to be at, let’s say, Six months to a year for me.
What would be that dream outcome in terms of the per the percentage? You could even give a range. Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve thought through it, right? Yeah. But that’ll help me figure out how much we need to scale this, right? Yeah. Are we growing this 10 times? Are we growing this
Elizabeth Kirke: five times?
There’s an opportunity locally for this thing that would’ve been 46,000 a year. And because of childcare, I absolutely cannot do that. Cuz I would be spending like 30,000 in childcare and I’m [00:11:00] like, it’s not worth it to me to make that, cause I make more than that as an author.
With everything all put together, the 15 that I would have left over, I’m making more than that. So I kinda gave myself this little goal this year. I was like, I’m gonna bring in more than 46, Yeah. To show that I’m making the right choice by not pursuing this other opportunity.
Without diving into salary, I’m not so far off it that I feel like it’s unattainable. But if I could get the subscription portion up to a good 40 to 50 of what I’m making, I would like, I would nail that and it would be crazy, but
Michael Evans: yeah. Yeah. So I got it.
That’s, I think this is achievable because right now we’re basically actually literally trying to 10 x your subscription income. So that’s okay, so let’s 10 x exit. Great, let’s go. So we have our goal, so we wanna 10 x your subscription income. So now we need to figure out how we got Yeah.
Numbers lit. Literally that’s so funny. Like it actually work works out. Yeah, that’s, so we wanna take your subscription income, 10 x exit right now. Let’s figure out though, cuz you’ve already done something that’s a big accomplishment. You’ve taken your [00:12:00] subscription income from nothing to, well over a hundred dollars a month.
You’re eclipse that in a big way. That’s awesome. Yeah. Let’s talk about what’s worked for you so far, how you’ve brought these fans in. What do you think has helped so far? Yeah. Let me take
Elizabeth Kirke: one second. I’ve got a guest who is letting me, he’s ready to come join us. Lemme grab that special guest.
Michael Evans: You’ve had two now, nap, a subscription.
Yeah. You launched it initially. So what happened when you launched it back in 2018 ish? Yeah. Did you get new fans then? And you said it stopped growing, right? So let’s, first let’s hear about what happened to get those
Elizabeth Kirke: first fans, right? Yeah. I posted it like just in my newsletter and on my author page and stuff.
And everyone who joined initially was already an existing fan. The one who’s on my highest tier right now. She has like the original 2011 brick of a book that I published with the original cover and stuff. She’s been around following me. Forever. So she’s like a hardcore fan. And the other one on one of my high tiers is actually old best friends with someone who was [00:13:00] one of my Alpha readers and who was there.
So she got in cool into it early. So they, the bulk of them are just people who had already been following me and were into it. Which is interesting cuz there’s so many other people who didn’t join who are like, who date back as well and they really, it was just this initial core group of people and they’ve stayed with it all these years.
And then every once in a while, sometimes if I mention it in a newsletter or I post about it on Facebook, I’ll get one or two more people who trickle in and then a couple months later they trickle back out. But more often than not they stay. I’ve, like I said, I started in 2018, so I’ve got people who joined it in 2018 and they’re still enjoying it enough that.
They’re there and they’re even upgrading their, that’s really cool questions to hire. Yeah, it’s, I love it. It’s great. And they’re even upgrading their subscriptions to hire tiers, but, it’s a question of how do I get them through the door? Cause it’s it’s a leap because it’s still, especially with Yeah, with authors, it’s still a new idea.
And you wanna know what am I getting that I’m not getting from just buying [00:14:00] their books? So there’s a there’s a little mental barrier between do I pay, do I get this and do I not? And then once they’re through the door and they get that content, they’re, they enjoy it. But yeah,
Michael Evans: because looking at your subscription and the benefits you’re offering, right?
They’re great. They’re actually great. I think we should talk about them. Yeah, it is. But I actually, I think what the unlock might be in framing this to your readers and how we market it, I think that marketing this better is what’s going to take this to the next level, right? Rather than completely changing your tiers or changing what you’re offering.
Because one you’ve already stated that your existing fans are stay Yeah, but you’re really offering in fact I looked at this and was like, wow, this is a lot for actually what they’re getting for, which is good. It’s good for the fan. But for instance, I saw like at $5 a month, you’re giving them a welcome swag item access to, to all of the more than magic books read along with the MES files.
They get a postcard once every quarter, chapter retellings which members of higher tiers can request that. Those are reve right in from another p o v. So they’re getting to decide those chapter retellings the ones of the higher tiers, and [00:15:00] then. You get a behind the depth sorry, behind the page, like insider info, bonus sort of info. Even deeper in, that’s and this is all for $5 a month. That’s a lot going on. Even to have the physical postcards and tan with it, I think it’s smart cuz those are probably low cost to send out. Yeah. Every quarter to get that sort of benefit, that alone is worth, three of those, four of those months paying $5 just to get a post.
So have you gotten a lot of people to click on this link? Are they going from your mailing list to here? Have you been able to see that data? They’re not,
Elizabeth Kirke: no. I actually just posted about it. I just sent out a newsletter yesterday and I was looking at it and actually I have it up still.
Let me see where that is. So I sent it and I’ve got of course it’s not loading cause I’m recording, so it’ll probably take a while, but yeah, no, it was a very low percentage.
Michael Evans: Because what I’m wondering in terms of like how you’re don’t
Elizabeth Kirke: viewing this, I’m converting them. I don’t think I’m converting them to actually
Michael Evans: they’re not clicking Or is it that they’re not clicking?
They’re not clicking. They’re not clicking. This is the prom. I see. And that’s actually, I think a, [00:16:00] that’s a good one to have, I think
Elizabeth Kirke: because you’re can solve that much easier. So I only send one newsletter a month, so it’s usually pretty jam packed.
I got five clicks for people telling me for my announcement about this is what ream is and here’s all the stuff you can get.
Michael Evans: When you say the newsletter’s jam packed. Tell me more. Is that
Elizabeth Kirke: this one I sent out it had actually just got nominated for
Michael Evans: do you wanna share your screen so I can see this?
Elizabeth Kirke: Is yeah, so here we’ve got.
I got my email. Yeah. So I had a,
Michael Evans: okay. Okay. So actually this is helpful. Can we, so your total list is 2000, did I see that right? Yeah. Yeah. My total list, this summer’s very helpful for me in terms of thinking about,
Elizabeth Kirke: yeah, this is what my total list is right now. Yeah. And you can see I had a pretty good, I think it’s a decent number of opens.
I don’t really dive into those analytics as often as I probably should, yeah, it’s a 26% open rate. And then the clicks like I said, it’s jam-packed. You can see that there are only 46 people clicking. And you can see for one of the links I included was for a book funnel promo, and you can see [00:17:00] that 33 different people clicked that one.
So they’re in there clicking. But then it, yeah, down a little for the ream link, it was only five people who clicked.
Michael Evans: Okay. I wanna, if you can show me the campaign of the email. Yeah. I would just say the first thing is each times our newsletters will include like a lot of different links.
Yeah.
Elizabeth Kirke: It was a really busy newsletter. This,
Michael Evans: yeah. When I have a busy newsletter, I basically include them because I don’t want Okay. Have sim five small announcements, five different times. Yeah. I put, but if I wanna make something big, if I wanna make something worthwhile, I wanna make it the top link at the top newsletter.
I’ve noticed this. Yeah. To the point that like, if it’s not the first link they’re probably, they’re not even gonna get to it. So in this one, yeah. So what we start
Elizabeth Kirke: with just like my little, Hey, it’s my newsletter again. And then I had the thing for the voting for my book. Then I had a freebie.
I’m in a, like an author group where we trade books. Every month we kinda swap newsletters. So I shared hers and yeah it’s way down here. And then I had a couple of different, like [00:18:00] book funnels Yeah. And book fairs I’m in. And then I did, I’ll tell you
Michael Evans: what, I’ll tell you what I would think if I was, oh, I definitely
Elizabeth Kirke: need to move it up.
Michael Evans: Cause you know what? I would think, you know what I would think if I was a fan, I would be like, cuz the connotation around a lot of subscription and membership services, right? And this isn’t all of them. This isn’t even necessarily a platform problem. This is more of a creator problem, is it’s almost like a donation. Yeah. Oh, I’ll donate to ’em, it’s an extra $5. Okay. And how many people realistically want to donate to you? There are people out there that actually who do wanna do it, right? So if you are clear about that and that’s how only how you want your subscription run, right?
That’s perfectly okay. But if you want to make your subscription more the foundation of your business, I think we need to reframe how we think about this and then promote it to our readers. Yeah. What do so if we think about. Our whole system, like one, and I’m using this language cuz it’s language we can all understand in marketing, like a funnel, right?
You have these readers on the outskirts that probably don’t even know who you are yet. They’re the cold audience, right? Yeah. Those you want to keep finding, but that cold audience won’t go to your [00:19:00] subscription landing page, right? And then be like, wow, I’m gonna join the Strides month.
I don’t even know this author. Yeah. Low chance, right? So there’s a big gap in the middle, which are more of your warm fans, right? Those are probably the people on your list for the most part. And your challenge is, how do I bring more of these warm fans into my super fan membership club? Yes. And how I literally think about it is everything runs through the membership first, right?
And then comes out of that. So essentially if you release a new book, That launch, you actually launch it into your subscription before you launching retailers. You do launch it on retailers. Very key. But the idea is once someone’s in your subscription Yeah, they’re gonna stick there. Yeah.
They’re not gonna have to make the choice to even pay you again. It automatically charges them. And they’re gonna get access to so much more that’s going to, one, make them happier and two, increase their lifetime value to you from a monetary standpoint. The authors that I see who are doing this, like for instance, Amelia, she very intentionally Yeah.
Makes subscriptions center of her business. Somewhere between around 40 to 50% of her total income comes from [00:20:00] her subscription. And her basic plan is everything runs through this thing and then goes out. So it’s almost like you’ve created I’ll use the word your own mini Disney, however you wanna word it.
This is your amusement park for your fans. And you’re really sharing about it as This is where I want you to be. This is where you should be, this is what you’re missing out on. And then, yeah, eventually a lot of those fans will get, the other book will get this, because I think a lot of times authors the big step that I’ve seen increase author subscriptions.
For instance, even Ellis is a KU author, who has started to have a very successful subscription. The big thing that she credits to it is her monthly exclusive novelist. She just takes one chapter a month and puts it in there. The key I guess in this is that your postcards are nice.
The read alongs are nice. The behind the page is nice, but I’m using the word nice. The thing that your readers want is your next book. And you have to think about this almost like your version of a concert. When people go to a concert, there’s a lot of money in the merch, the bonus stuff.
Let’s be real. There’s a lot of that. But people don’t go to the concert just to buy the t-shirt. Correct. They go to the concert to listen to [00:21:00] music with fans and get that special experience. So how can you make reading your book a special experience, right? How can you make that something where it’s like reading it inside of the subscription is something that you won’t get access to anywhere else.
And oftentimes that is just the simple, you get it three months before anyone else in here, right? You’ll be able to comment on the story. I’ll do a live meetup where I’ll do a Zoom and you can ask me questions about the book. We’ll do a whole launch of it inside the description that no one else gets access to hype up it.
So that’s oh wow. Each time I read this book, This is the brand new experience and now ultimately you get them and then what keeps them there? They’re in on that new book. And then they’ll continue to stay there because it’s oh, next month I get this postcard, I got this short story, I got this interesting behind the scenes.
And they’re just gonna be that much more excited for your next book. And the next book and the next one. For serial fiction authors, it’s a bit more natural, right? Because it’s this kind of chapter by chapter approach. But you don’t have to take that approach, right? You can just take the whole book at once and say the whole book is done.
Yeah. Early access for it, right? Because I think when I look at like the numbers [00:22:00] of your list, right? If I wanted 10 x what you’re doing here, my goal would be to, first I think it’s very doable for you to get a hundred paying subscribers outta these people. I do wanna mention that having 20 with a list of 2000 is far from a failure.
I think that’s actually it shows that you’re having something that’s really working. But it is not unrealistic to have 5% of a list. Subscribed. So I think you could get Yeah. Five x from your current audience in. And then the game would be can you actually double the profit from your average Yeah.
Person, which I know you’ve already started to adjust those prices, but at those higher tiers that you have, it looks like you have at the 10, 20, 25, 50, a hundred dollars. Have you seen, I know you have at least one fan at the hundred dollars but have you, what kind of movement have you seen in terms of the upgrading from your existing 20
Elizabeth Kirke: fans?
Yeah. The existing ones I think only two switched over from Patreon cuz it is the same the same tiers. So they’re staying pretty still, but I am seeing people are joining like, They’re [00:23:00] joining at the higher levels than they were before. Like when it first started out, everyone was like the one and the five and the low.
But now as people join they’re going to the 10. They’re going to the 20. So just maybe cuz it, they see that it’s already established and they see what content is there. I don’t know. But they’re, yeah, they’re the people who are joining. They seem to be going for the higher ones.
Michael Evans: No, that’s awesome.
Can’t complain that. Yeah, no, I think that’s great. At the 10 and $20 tier I mean if you could make the sort of average tier price that a fan is on somewhere around 10 or 15 a month, right? Yeah. Average. There’s gonna be people who are higher, people who are lower. That would be great.
That’d be great in this situation. Yeah. So I’m wondering at the $5 tier. There’s so much that’s going on in this tier, and then the next tier, they’re getting this swag goody bag. That the same is different from the welcome swag item. Explain to me as I go through your tiers.
Yeah. From 10 to 20 to 25 what would be the incentive to upgrade?
Elizabeth Kirke: Let me pull those up too. Have them fresh. Yeah. So as they’re starting, once you [00:24:00] get to the 10 so the swag item is one thing, it’s gonna be an envelope with, yeah. A couple things in it. But then with the $10, it’s gonna be an actual box that has instead of one or two items, it’s gonna be like five or six items.
And then they get the additional, they get to request the chapter rewrites. They get to vote on the point of view for one of the cereals, and then every quarter they’re getting, another item of swag. One or two like little things as opposed to the $5 two, they’re just getting the one.
And then, for Christmas or something, I might order a big bulk box and then yay, they get like a surprise thing, but they’re, it’s not gonna be a regular every quarter they’re getting something. And then once you switch to the 20, they’re getting stuff early before anyone else. They’re getting the books.
They get the cover reveals and the blurbs. And then they’re still getting that little swag thing once a quarter, but they’re getting an extra one so as it goes up, they get extra. And then Yeah, so they’re getting everything first. They’re getting more physical items, more options.
And then [00:25:00] once what I did and it worked for someone, so I guess, it worked for someone after 20 is I actually switch over. And people don’t really get more necessarily, they get a couple extra things. They get a postcard and they can pick the name of a character.
But I was actually experimenting with just seeing if they’d be willing to pay more. Cuz I feel like for me, sometimes, there, there’s all these price models now where you pay like what you feel the value is. And I feel like if there was something I really liked and they were like, you can do five or $10, I might do the $10 cuz I really like it, or if I’m donating to a cause, I would donate more money maybe for, I’m passionate about.
So I’m just experimenting with the higher tiers. And I say, it’s the same perks, you doing this will help me. And I tell them, if you do 25 instead of $20, you’re gonna help me fund audiobooks and I can buy a night better swag, as perks and stuff.
And then for the $50 one again, I’m like, you’re gonna help with audiobooks and you can defray my overhead costs and you get a bonus. Thank you note [00:26:00] for this. There’s kind of an experiment to see if people, especially cuz if you know where your money’s going. I’m not just pocketing it.
Yeah. I’m turning it around and I’m putting it into the audiobook. Especially cuz they’re on YouTube for free right now. Yeah. Yeah. I have a little bit that I can earmark toward the next audiobook. And it works. And it worked. Yeah. Someone. Someone went from my $25 tier on Patreon to the $100 tier on Ream.
And that one is literally the only difference that one you do get all nine. My core series that I really do all the work in is more than Magic. And that’s got nine. Yeah. Yeah. That’s got nine paperbacks. And the big thing is the a hundred dollars tier is you’ll get those nine paperbacks signed, but once you have all nine, I’m, you’re not getting a 10, you’re just getting the nine, but Right.
It’s there. And if you really want these signed paperbacks that’s one way to get them.
Michael Evans: Okay. I’m with it. I totally understand. I think already it’s hard , when you have someone upgrade from 25 to a hundred dollars a month.
Yeah. Even for one month, that’s an extra, that’s a lot of money. That’s a big, that’s a big difference. So yeah, that’s not not so much of a failure if you ask me. So I think[00:27:00] the action plan, where you’re going to see the most progress is in better marketing. I think that there could be a valuable way to restructure these tiers in a minor way, a minor tweak, which is don’t mess with your higher tiers.
I really like those. Right now with your lower tiers, what I’m wondering is at the $20 per month, they’re getting the early chapters, early episodes, early access, and what I’m wondering is the fans who reverse that, almost make that either in your five or $10 tier and then move up some more of the bonus ones to 10 and 20.
And then I would say to further that, if you want to do, cuz you talked about community. If you wanna really do like a community event around your launch, send out a special postcard around launch to do a Zoom that only certain people can attend. Don’t make that the entry level, tier make that almost like your v i P ticket for the concert.
You’re going up that next level of the experience. And if you have a lot of energy around that, people are gonna feel who are like they’re fans of yours. Like they’re missing [00:28:00] out if they’re not a part of it. So then they’re you have this constant upgrade embedded into it.
Like you get a fan in at $5, right? That’s what you want ’em to do, right? And then, Do you, they have so many reasons as they figure out more and more about what’s going on here. Wow, this is awesome. Not only do I wanna stay, but I actually wanna upgrade. I wanna go up to $10.
I wanna go up to $20. And I think there’s reasons because of the physical things you’re doing and just the extra support at the 25, 50, a hundred dollars tiers. I think those are perfect for now. But when it comes to these 10 to $20 tier range, I think it’s worthwhile thinking about how you can get the people in.
And then how you can get them up more. Yeah. But, When it comes to the marketing, so we talked about your mailing list. What are other ways that you’ve mentioned your subscription and what are other areas that you would say like you have to reach your readers social media, what are the other ways that you kind of market typically?
Elizabeth Kirke: It goes in my newsletter. And one of the things I do that I saw it’s converted a couple people not many, but every once in a while someone joins from it.
What I do is whenever I do a new post I share it in my Facebook group and on [00:29:00] my page and stuff, and I just say, Hey, there’s a new chapter of this, there’s a new thing here. There’s new behind the scenes kind of thing. And I share it. And what’s great is the people who are currently subscribed, who are also in those groups, they often respond.
So I think that helps cuz they’ll be like, oh, let me go check it out. And oh, I loved it. It was great. So people are seeing that they, there are members and that they’re enjoying
Michael Evans: it. How frequently do you do that? Every time you post or just every time
Elizabeth Kirke: I post. And then Cool. Usually when I send out a newsletter it shows up.
I have a link to it at the bottom and don’t forget that you can join this. But then if I, especially if I have a new feature, there’s been a big one, I’ll be like, Hey, here’s all the, what’s going on right now that you can check out. Yeah. And I do see people every once in a while when I do that they kind of bite and they go check it out.
Michael Evans: Let’s do a campaign then. For lack of better words, you’re not gonna forever be marketing your subscription at Level 100.
But if our goal was let’s get as many subscribers as possible from our existing fan base in the next 30 to 60 days. What I’m wondering, cuz like I said, if you switch [00:30:00] around the thinking of it as it’s not this Thing that readers can do that’s off to the side.
Cause that’s how your readers probably are thinking about it, right? Just looking at what you’re doing. It’s almost there’s like this extension of what you’re doing, right? But when I’ve seen people do this, the most successfully, I’ve seen YouTube creators for instance, launch subscriptions to have thousands of members in a week, right?
And other people completely flop, right? Who have the same subscriber account and the same actually adoring fan base, right? So a lot of these things, when we talk about people might be like, is it my fault? Is my fan base just talking about support me? It’s no. Marketing is so important in terms of how you frame this.
And when I’ve seen people be most ful when I’ve supported creative people, cuz I do it quite frequently, right? I’m the kind of person that, if it just feels like they have a link to their subscription it almost becomes this sort of blind thing. At the end of the email, join my Patreon, join my ream if you want.
It’s not really. If I’m cool where I’m at right now. Yeah. Tell me why I need to join now. There were these creators just the other day I joined their subscription and they just recently announced it. So we’re talking like last month, right? Month or so. They already have [00:31:00] 2000 people and they have several hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube.
But it’s interesting when you quantify the value of a subscriber to an email list follower and that’s a pretty impressive Yeah. Conversion. Yeah. That’s like very impressive for a YouTube social platform to have almost one out of every thousand subscribers do that. Yeah.
Very interesting. Or sorry, one out of every hundred subscribers, they’re getting like 1% conversion. They have a similar conversion rate on their YouTube channel that you do on your mail list. So that’s just interesting. So what are they doing that’s working and. They literally at the end of the video, basically were like, this is our mission.
We don’t have ads in our channel. We don’t take sponsors and this is where you can actually help us do this full-time. And we’re going to be releasing an exclusive video every month inside of here. So if you love us and you actually want to experience what we’re doing, you have to be in here.
There’s no option. Like you have to support us to get that content. And when it was said like that, I was like, I really wanna watch their other, I love the video I just watched. I really wanna watch their next video.[00:32:00] Yeah, I’ll sign up for $5 a month. And it’s a little bit disingenuous to, as and not a great thing as an author, I think as our business model to say, I’m only gonna write this book in my subscription.
That’s not gonna help you find new fans that can one day be in your, I’ve
Elizabeth Kirke: seen a lot of backlash recently. There have been a few authors who, they write the book and you read the book and then you get to the end of it and they say, if you wanna read the epilogue, you have to subscribe to my thing.
There’s a lot of backlash for that. Cause that’s
Michael Evans: No, that’s not the move. Yeah. No. Yeah. It’s not cool. It’s, the reader don’t have to
Elizabeth Kirke: then have to go
Michael Evans: somewhere. Likewise, they didn’t say, Hey, this is video, one and we’re gonna cut it off. In part two, you have to pay for it. It was completely disconnected.
And I just liked them. Yeah. So which is how your reader feel about you. Exactly. Know there’s really the two approaches, which is I’ll say like the one approach, cuz this is gonna be feeling of people listening, is the even Alices approach. And the other approach is the early access approach.
The Avon Alices approach is very interesting. It’s, I’m going to very slowly drip feed you a book over the course of three years that is exclusive, right? That one [00:33:00] day won’t be right. So for the next three years, you’re the only who gets to read this, but from a creative load, right? It’s only one chapter a month.
Yeah. So it’s not like you’re devoting all your time producing exclusive content. It’s only a portion. That’s one strategy you could take. The other strategy is basically, hey, this is gonna be elsewhere eventually. But if you wanna read book two now, like I know you wanna read book to now.
Then you should come here because if you don’t, you’re gonna have to wait three months, two months, whatever you wanna say. That is very enticing for anyone. Yeah. Who likes your stories because they want the next one. So what I would recommend then doing is, You’re already doing that to a certain extent, right?
This isn’t revolutionary, even for your subscription process, you already have early access, right? But it doesn’t seem to be the emphasis of what would bring a fan in. That’s not what’s highlighted to me. Coming into it. And likewise, I’m not sure that’s what you’re highlighting in your marketing, even for your book, right?
Like when you launch a book. Yeah. The subscription isn’t a part of it. And when you launch a book, make this subscription the thing that people come to first and then, circle it to the retailers, find those new fans, bring ’em back in. So what would you think if I told you let’s [00:34:00] design like a launch campaign that would get your fans really interested in joining your subscription to get the next book release that you have.
Talk to me like what you’re thinking through when I say this. I’d be all over that. What are your, some of your ideas, what’s your next release coming up?
Elizabeth Kirke: My problem is my next release that I’m working on is a different genre, so
Michael Evans: I have that. Ooh, I have a, so this is getting spicy.
We’re gonna dive into
Elizabeth Kirke: this. Okay. In different, might have, reach out to different people, but I also, I am currently doing a couple of cereals and one of them is, like you said, it’s gonna be a book when it’s done. So maybe I just need to push more, if you’re interested in this book it’s coming out chapter by chapter.
Come read it now. And since I am offering, like I said, it’s a nine book series since I’m offering it on there anyway, after you’ve read the first book that you bought from Amazon or wherever, if you get to the end of it and you’re like, Hey, I could go buy all the rest of these at 3 99 a pop, or I could spend $5 and get them all and all this [00:35:00] other stuff too.
Like there, there should be a way to make that the appealing choice. I’m not gonna go to Amazon and buy another book for four bucks. I’m gonna join the subscription and get that book and all the rest of the books and all
Michael Evans: this other stuff. Are you mentioning it at the back of your books right now?
I
Elizabeth Kirke: am, but I’m not framing it like that. That was just, that was turning as you were talking, at the end of my book, it’s currently, Hey, you can also do this and get all the behind the scenes stuff, but I do not have it framed as, don’t go by the next one on Amazon. Go here and get all of
Michael Evans: them.
What you can do too, because at the end of the book, it’s like this valuable real estate that you don’t wanna overload the reader either, right? One thing is if someone subscribes to you, Monthly, it starts paying you monthly. Not only do you have that revenue stream now, but you do have their email.
And you can add them to your mailing list. Meaning if that’s the one thing, like they get to the end of the book and that’s the one thing you’re basically telling them. You could go read book two in the retailer that’s there. Or you could do this, which is way better.
And I’m gonna tell you why you should Yeah. That would be so clear to me as a family. Okay. I have two options. I love that book. I know I wanna continue with you, I’m gonna continue with you Elizabeth, maybe, and a lot of years will choose this. [00:36:00] I’m used to this retailer.
Yeah. That process seems scary. I maybe one day then they’ll just, you know that, that’s okay. That’s okay. But for a lot of fans, they’ll be like, this sounds pretty cool and sounds like maybe even a deal in a sense. Let me check it out. Let me check it out. And that framing is really, yeah.
Interesting. And then you would have it where, Your $5 tier, like you have it now, your $5 tier is that kind of library card tier, right? Where they get in, they get the whole access, like your own mini ku, right? And then your upper tier is like that $10 tier maybe is where that early access starts, right?
Kind of like you have it. And then that $20 tier is where they can start to get some more of that bonus stuff and maybe access to launch events you do around when there’s a new series, right? You go, Hey, we’re gonna do a Zoom event, we’re gonna do this. And then you basically have your sort of almost pitch or your pitch to people, right?
When they, when you create an email, it’s, hey I’m launching this cereal and I’ve actually already started, I’m already 10 chapters in and if you wanna read my next book, you can start to get it here. Each month. And what you could [00:37:00] also do as well is if you just wanted to get them in, you could have the early access, normally be at the $10 tier, but then to get them in, say, Hey, for a limited time, I’ll be giving people early access who join this tier.
Now in the next 30 days, you’re not always gonna get early access to the $5 year, but you will for the next 30 days. And then they’ll get in the spot where they’ll get that content, they’ll get the other content, the postcards, all that stuff. But then if they want maybe early access in the future, you could grandfather those fans in on it.
Or you could say, Hey, that was the deal. Like you’re in now you got that early access, but if you wanna get early access to future stuff, there is this other tier for you to join. And then there’s the launch events and those tiers and all the other stuff. So then they’re in and they’re upgrading.
Yeah, exactly. And they could go along that path. Yeah. It’s something. And then if you frame it like your club because people do want to have a relationship, right? Yeah. With, you as a creator they like you, they like what you’re doing. If you frame it like this is your sort of membership club.
This is like your v i p superfan space where you’re gonna curate the best experience for them. That would make, I think a fan be like, wow, I [00:38:00] want to join this now and make it the full email. It has to be the full focus, right? Yeah. Just the first link. The only link. Yeah. You can have your links at the bottom to your books, keep the footer, but the actual body of the email Yeah.
Should be solely focused on doing that. And then what you could do is retargeting, right? Which this is when you’ll, in that ma email that you send out, basically create an automation that highlights a group, creates a group outta people who click on that subscription link in your subscription. And then, You’ll exclude people from that group who have already bought your subscription, which you’ll know because you’ll have their email.
So then you’ll have this sitting group of people who’ve clicked but haven’t bought. And those are people that you can do completely different type of marketing to. Then you can follow up with ’em and be like, Hey, cuz you really only wanna highlight one key. I know this sounds weird, but when you have a subscription of so much stuff going on, you wanna highlight one thing cuz one thing will get them over the edge.
It’s not gonna be the five things. That’s overwhelming one thing. But then for those other fans, you could start to say, Hey, thanks for checking it out.[00:39:00] I actually am gonna give you the first three chapters of the cereal that were in there, just so that you can try it out right now, put it in that body of the email, right?
You could say, Hey I wanna let you know a little bit more about what’s going on. I know I told you that you get an early launch here, but I wanna let you know that there’s this postcard I’ll send you. You can take a picture of the last month’s one and put it in the body of the email. There will be this and there’ll be that.
And, just letting you know, thank you so much for supporting me. You don’t necessarily wanna mention them like, Hey, I saw you clicked. Why didn’t you buy? That’s not the approach to it, but the idea that I’m actually going to reward you for even trying to see, I’m gonna give you more of a bigger peak and maybe even some of the content, right?
Because those people that can then increase your conversion by another 20%, right? So if you get a hundred people to click 20 by, this can go get you another six or seven people. This type of strategy. That’s the sort of system that you’ll have. And then each time you launch the goal is I wanna get more clicks, I wanna get more people to convert.
And then more people sit in this like super warm list, right? The best way we can call it the super fans that will assume who clicked but didn’t convert. That’s like your ultra warm audience that you’re [00:40:00] priming to one day be a subscriber. It might not be now, it might not be a month from now, but it might be one day when they have the money to when the right thing connects with them, they’re like, ah, I gotta do this right now.
That would be my strategy. So the goal is ultimately to get them to click, right? Because that data point’s really valuable, but you don’t want them to trick them into clicking. You’re not just gonna make the whole email a button.
If anyone’s thinking like that, who’s listening, that’s not a good idea. But get them to genuinely click. Yeah. Because they’re genuinely interesting. Yeah. Exactly. And my also advice is to do four emails. And a wave of four launches. Think about it, like you have the initial wave before the ask, right?
Because it’s whenever everyone has reciprocity and it’s something that’s very common. Everyone displays this sort of behavior. This is actually probably why your reader is on a hundred dollars here. I know this seems weird, but if someone feels like they’ve gotten so much value from your work they’re going to want to repay the favor somehow.
And that doesn’t mean money for everyone, right? That’s why your super fans aren’t, do not equal money, right? But some of them will. Others might just share your book with friends, which is wonderful. That’s beautiful, right? But what you should do [00:41:00] is in that first email, when you talk about your subscription, don’t sell them immediately.
You wanna said it’s, Gary Vanerchuk has a sales book about this That’s jab, jab write hook. And the idea is that you want to basically, and he use it in this sort of boxing way, you want to keep jabbing them into submission so that they love you so much that when you sell them right, they’re instantly gonna buy.
That’s the idea. So how can you keep jabbing your audience even with something like this, right? Correct. So that you’re not turning yourself into some glorified subscription salesperson good marketing’s not just shoving the next deal down their throat. So what I would suggest is in this four wave launch if we’re gonna think about it like this, and you can think about every campaign you do this, right? But think about it as four waves. Wave one. I am going to just share with them something awesome that is happening in my subscription that my current subscribers have. Your current subscribers, you’re not gonna share them the whole month thing.
But maybe it’s one chapter, it’s one this, you could put the link subtly in the end, but the real goal is to actually share with them access that they would not have had before. So maybe it’s your serial, you’re gonna give them chapter one, right? You’re gonna give them maybe even chapter two in a second email, [00:42:00] Because maybe your big cliff hangers at the end of chapter three, and that’s when you really wanna do the ask, right? So you’re gonna wait to do that and time that, right? Another thing could be, you’re working on an interesting project and you are gonna be doing some like launch events. You might be doing like a series of two or three live streams.
Invite them to the first one for free. They get access to the first event. It depends on what benefit and kind of what rollout strategy you want to do in terms of what is the give right before you ask, but give before you ask. And the second time is the time that you’re like, now let’s ask.
Okay. But like wave two, I would even think about this almost as week two cuz you don’t wanna hit them all in one week with five emails. So week two, you now ask them. This book’s launching and it’s funny when you frame it like this cuz readers are so used to just reading stories odd, but that’s, it’s not how odd it’s what they do, but it’s like odd to think about it that way.
Oh wait, if I just frame my subscription at the next place, they can go to buy it and the only place they can go to buy and read my work for at least right now. You’d be shocked at how much people will just follow you, right? Because they want your work. So that is then the framing of the second time is this project’s launched.
I want you to get it, and this is where you can [00:43:00] buy, you don’t need to mention subscription ream. You could say, just so you know, you’ll get monthly access to my work here. So it’s monthly and you’ll get access to my next launch and the next one and the next one all easy. If that doesn’t interest you, no worries.
It’ll be released six months later somewhere else. Don’t even give links, don’t even mention it. Third email is actually going back to giving again, highlighting another thing in your subscription. Maybe if you gave them the first three chapters of your cereals in your subscription, you also are gonna give them.
A sneak peek of something at one of your higher tiers. Remind them that you have higher tiers, right? So maybe if you’re sending a signed book out, you can do something around that. Maybe you want to give them a sort of bonus content. You’ve done rewritten scenes before, right? You could give one of the rewritten scenes that someone’s voted on, right?
And then the fourth one would be the closing message, cuz you don’t wanna just have every month the subscription be the thing that you’re again promoting. Huge. So as you run this test, I would have wave four basically be the closing message. I’d have it be short. I’d be very straight to the point about this is what you get on my subscription.
For those of you that are confused, [00:44:00] definitely make the big benefit, the one that you highlight. And then this is where you join and make the email no more than I could scan and basically see it on one screen of my phone, right? Maybe I have to scroll a little bit. I shouldn’t have to scroll to get to the button.
Correct? That’s it. Simple short. Thank you for your support. You could even say, cuz now it’s speak four. I’ve had 20 new people join to support me and I had a goal to get to a hundred people because actually I’m wanting to do this full time and I have a family and I’m taking care of them. You can mention these sorts of things.
Yeah. If you want. Perfect. That’s my big campaign picture. Yeah. But tell me what you think.
Elizabeth Kirke: I like that. I do like that. I was actually, when you were saying the third one, like for the offering a sneak peek or something. I actually, prior to this had been thinking with the serial where people are able to vote on who narrates it.
Yes. I was thinking every once in a while I want to open it up to my newsletter and be like, Hey guys, this time you get to vote. And maybe even you guys can read this one, but you don’t get to read the other ones. Cause there’s some yeah. But you can read it, you can vote and
Michael Evans: then.
That’s it. That’s genius. That’s how you get ’em in. Exactly. That’s it. Perfect. And in a way, [00:45:00] the idea is like each time you’re marking your subscription, you’re not just because it’s uncomfortable to ask. I find that no one wants to do that. They needs something to, yeah. Plus we as authors don’t want.
Yeah. Rarely do I make an author who’s yeah, no. I literally just want to every day sell. We wanna create. Yeah. Yeah. We wanna, yeah, we wanna create. So if you make the email fun, like in this email, I get to share with them, right? Yeah. That next thing, ask them what they wanna vote on.
That immediately becomes fun for me. And magically it’ll be fun for your readers because when you train your readers to open up your email and get sold to Yeah. Like half of them it isn’t even regardless of what you’re selling, right? They’re just gonna tune you out of it. Exactly. Yeah.
Elizabeth Kirke: Yes. Good stuff.
Good stuff.
Michael Evans: I think it would be, very interesting to, to lean it. And see what happens. And ultimately it’ll be the trial that is so important. Like in fact, yeah. I would love to see the follow up me post the Facebook group. Let me know DM e Yeah. I would love to see how that goes a month from now and then see, yeah.
This is what worth, this is what did, because if it completely flops right. It completely flops. Yeah. You tried it. Yeah. If it works, [00:46:00] but it doesn’t work as well as you wanted it to. Okay. I would love, it would be great and something like this could get you like 10 subscribers, right? Yeah, that would be great.
That’d be epic. What
Elizabeth Kirke: I have on Pat anyway. So get, yeah.
Michael Evans: Can and yeah. Cannon alone. Yeah. And I do think it’s possible, right? I do. Yeah. I really do. So I think that kind of approach is key. And you will see slowly okay. That launch, people were like, this is still a little new to me. But you got those tenants.
But Yeah. But the next launch, they’ll get a seat happen again. Your fans will have talked about in the group and you’re gonna get more of them. Exactly. And then more so it’s not a zero something where it’s oh, the first launch, that’s as good as it, the lever do. Right now I’m done. Just the beginning of learning how to do it better.
Yeah,
Elizabeth Kirke: exactly. And it’s great.
Cause I don’t have anything to lose. Like I’m writing it anyway, so I might as well. You’re gonna
Michael Evans: release it later on the retailers. Yeah. Yeah. You’re gonna, taking that outta the equation. Yes. That’s, if that requires Yeah. So it’s just, see, at this, and you already know this unless you have, unless you’re writing a book a month.
Which is, really tough for anyone to do. Yeah. I did that. Especially tough. Yeah. Especially when you’re like taking care of like young children. Yeah. And being like a rockstar [00:47:00] mom and having the rest of your life. It’s hard, right? Yeah. But then it’s. If you’re not writing a book a month, then it’s okay, you have to have all these thousands of fans to actually make a realistic income. Especially in the States where we are like, yeah. Yeah. It’s hard. It’s hard. Yeah. So it’s okay, ultimately like books are rather inexpensive. There’s nothing wrong that it’s accessible. We should keep them accessible. We should keep people being able to read our books on retailers, but how can you as a creative person make more from what you do?
Exactly. And this is the way you can do that. So it is this, you can’t lose cuz it’s Yeah. You’re not gonna take out the other revenues. Yeah, exactly. Those can only, those will continue to Yeah. Exist and hopefully grow as well.
I wanna ask you, is there anything else that you have questions about? You wanna go? This is actually
Elizabeth Kirke: really helpful. Got a lot of, got a lot written down, a lot brainstormed. It was helpful. Great. Yeah.
Yeah, this was great. It’s motivating too, like it’s just motivating to like, talk about it and kinda get that enthusiasm. I wanna run outta here and start implementing
Michael Evans: stuff and Yeah. I’m big on trying to get an actionable plan. Yeah. That you don’t need to overthink, right? Yeah. Medicine’s overwhelming, but ultimately, like we’ve identified the next steps forward, right?
We have the [00:48:00] big picture goal and we know that the next goal is really just, let’s get another subscriber, right? Let’s get another paying subscriber. Let’s start building it. Yeah. Make it worth your time. So that’s what we wanna do. And I think that all these things, ultimately I think we identified that.
Exactly. You’ve got the base, you’ve got something working. The problem is marketing it better, which is a really great problem to have. Cause I think it’s one of the easier ones, right? Yeah. In my opinion, if you don’t have, people might disagree with me. Yeah.
Elizabeth Kirke: You’re in trouble if you don’t have content.
You’re not. Yeah.
Michael Evans: Yeah. To anyone who’s just starting writing you, you got this, you got it. It takes some time, but it is more challenging when you don’t have the next book launch coming up. Yeah. Like the biggest thing when you’re getting started is if you’re looking to launch your subscription, You don’t need to have the back list in all these books.
You can, it’s helpful. Yeah. But you do wanna have something that you’re creating Yeah. That you can start to share with your fans. And hopefully you’ve identified most importantly people who will like that. And those are things that you’ve not only done, but have already found those things. So I think you’re like, at a, at advanced stage and I’m just lucky [00:49:00] that we were able to help.
Yeah, absolutely. Awesome.
I hope you enjoyed this podcast episode. I know I had a lot of fun chatting with Elizabeth. Now, if you want to help the conversation and actually provide Elizabeth some advice, make sure to check out the Post I. I’ll link to it in the comments in the Facebook group and descriptions for authors. We have three more sessions just like this.
I’m so excited for it and I’m sure we’ll do more in the future. And if you wanna potentially. Have your subscription have an in-depth hour of personal feedback from me and Emelia and be able to get some feedback from the group. This is something we do by lottery. Uh, we just make a post in the Facebook group at some point, and those who get the most votes have the most compelling story we’ll bring onto the podcast in the future.
So sometime in the next few months, I’m sure we’ll do this again. So, My best advice is if you wanna participate, uh, join the Facebook group, join our cuny, be an active participant, [00:50:00] and be ready when that post goes live because we’ve had a lot of fun with this and we definitely want to do more episodes like this in the future.
Now, if you want to catch up on all the episodes we’ve already done, then I recommend checking out some of the other episodes we have in the Descriptions for Authors podcast. Every single one has unique insights, amazing authors, and. I just give credit to this incredible community for being able to come on and share so openly their journey and their insights with fellow subscription authors.
So definitely check out our other podcast, and if you haven’t yet, definitely listen to the summit sessions. We actually had a whole virtual summit that’s totally free. You can find it on YouTube length description that will help you start and go your description. So anyways, I hope you check that out.
That’s enough for me. I hope you all keep having an awesome time. Keep having an awesome summer. It is like already, like over [00:51:00] halfway through summer-ish, it feels like. I know I’m gonna be back in school and like five or six weeks from when this releases, which is wild. But it’ll be my senior year of college.
So one year left and. Then I guess I’m just a subscription author, leader person, community person, full-time. That’s the plan. That’s wild. But we’ll get there. We’ll get there. Okay. All right. All right. See y’all soon. Thank you for being a part of this with us. And in the meantime, don’t forget Storytellers Rule the World.