By Michael Evans on March 21, 2023.
I first started with a question, what makes an author subscription/membership successful?
This, of course, led to a broader question, what makes a membership business successful, to begin with? And how can we scale this from 1 reader to 10 readers to hundreds and thousands?
Think about the companies, brands, and communities you are loyal to. What do they have in common?
I’ll share a through line for me: They make me feel like they care about me.
The biggest companies in the world do this. Amazon’s customer obsession. We know Amazon cares cause they give us everything as fast and cheap as possible (that doesn’t always go so well for us authors). Apple’s strict privacy laws and elegant design starts from the packaging of all their products.
*Obviously* these mega-corporations don’t always stick true to these ideas above… and have increasingly become a bit more monopolistic… but that’s a conversation for another day.
Now let’s zoom closer to home.
My favorite books and movies — the characters feel like friends to me. The creators I want to support and the small businesses I continually show up to support are the ones I feel connected to — and they feel connected to me.
But how can we do this as authors? How can we show our readers that we care about them?
This goes beyond the email blast of *I hit X ranking in the Kindle store, thank you so much for your support*. Those are fine and good. But we have to be better than average.
Why?
Let’s look at the gym industry. Alex Hormozi cites that the average gym has an unsubscribe rate of 9% per month (this is also commonly called churn in the business world).
This means that for every 100 members in a gym, 9 of them will cancel every month. That means 91 the next month. 82 the month after that. After 1 year this gym with 100 members will only have 25 members in it.
Yikes.
What do most gym owners do in this position? Ruthlessly focus on finding new gym members. Hence the advertising, the crazy promotions… you get the picture. After all, if they can’t find 9% more members each month (that is every single month) they will lose members.
Does this sound familiar?
What other industry has extremely high marketing costs? An obsession with tactics and promotions to find new fans? It sounds like I’m speaking to an older version of myself, who spent $10,000 on Facebook Ads with extremely low margins, convinced that the next ad would boost my books high enough in the ranking to get some algorithmic love.
I lost a lot of time in my author career doing this. And I wasn’t focused on building a sustainable system.
Instead, I should have been focused on my existing readers. On showing them that I care. On getting them to stick around longer.
After all, there’s a positive side to this. If instead of a 10% unsubscribe rate in my subscription, if I can reduce that to a 5% unsubscribe rate, my average reader will stick around twice as long and pay me twice as much. And if you can get that down to 3% (which is best in class… but not impossible), then you can be making triple more per reader over a lifetime than all the author business owners who have a 9% unsubscribe rate.
Sounds fun right? Except, I know what you’re thinking.
How do I show my readers that I care about them? How can I get them to stick around in my membership?
In the beginning, this may be simple. You can reach out to everyone personally. You can put in the legwork to make your first member, your second member, and even your fifth member feel super special.
But what do you do when you have 100 readers in your subscription? Or better yet 1,000 readers in your subscription?
This may seem like a nice problem to have. But solving this is essential to the survival of any author’s business.
As we learned — authors with an unsubscribe rate that is 5% rather than 10% will see double the revenue per reader in their subscription (which likely leads to close to double the overall subscription revenue, and even further increased profits).
With the rise of new technologies, it may be tempting for us authors to automate more of these systems. Ever more lucid chatbots. Ever more complicated email automations. But does this really show a reader that we care?
I don’t think so.
Care comes from CARING. That’s an action.
When we pay attention to our readers, they will pay attention to us. But this is easier said than done, especially at scale. This is where systems come into place.
And as top subscription authors (and aspiring top subscription authors), we need incredible systems in place to ensure our success.
It comes down to one big lesson.
“Don’t automate what you should systematize” — Alex Hormozi.
Here are 3 actionable takeaways for authors (no matter your size) to build scalable systems that show your care for your readers and keep them in your membership for longer periods.
- When they show care for you, show them care back. This is simple on the surface. If your readers send you a DM, make a post in a Facebook Group, or email you, you should respond to them personally and with care. This is easy when you have a few readers contacting you each week. But what happens when you have dozens? Set aside time each day or week to interact with your readers and think about hiring a trusted community manager who can help out with this engagement. Brandon Sanderson is famous for doing this and even posts a yearly review to have people inside his business introduce themselves to his community of readers. This is a great strategy. Invite someone into the community, and make them a trusted insider, so that they can help you respond and manage a greater influx of comments and care from your readers.
- Quarterly or monthly community events can help your members show care for each other, making your membership even more attractive. Infrequent virtual events such as a Zoom meet-up, live reading of your latest chapters, or a holiday related to your books are great ways to bring fans together. Sparking friendships between readers in your community will help retain readers longer. Why? Think about your local gym, coffee shop, or even a Facebook Group online. The places we have real human interactions that make us feel special are the places we want to come back to. If you can make your subscription one of those places, you will have a sustainable business as an author.
- Personalized check-ins with members to make them feel heard. This is all about knowing where a reader is at in their journey with you and reaching out to ask them about it. Let’s say you just sent a signed book to a tier on your subscription. Before the end of the month, maybe reach out to your readers and ask them if it arrived safely. You could even then ask for a picture and make a collage of the images. Then, you can post this collage in your community to celebrate the books arriving safely to your readers. Did a reader comment a bunch on a recent story of yours? Maybe you share with them the next chapter extra early as a thank you or ask them if they finished it and what they thought about it? We must remember that for years Amazon has automated these kinds of notifications on our behalf through their Kindle Apps. But these notifications are impersonal and largely ineffective. Why? Because humans are social creatures. And we are trained to ignore automated bots and messages. After all — we are wired to be social creatures. That means connecting with other people! Thus, as subscription authors, it’s key to add our own personal touch to the notes we send to readers throughout their membership journey.
Of course, I know what you’re thinking.
It would be a lot easier if we had more data and better technology to allow us to systematize these things. That way we can layer our human touch on top of these activities as authors so that we can show care for our readers without spending so much time and energy.
The possibilities are limitless. And as many of you know, we at Subscriptions for Authors have been working on creating a subscription platform by fiction authors for fiction authors.
Bringing this future to life, one where we as authors can have our own platforms to connect directly with our readers easier and better than ever before, is what I spend my entire day thinking about.
For now, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to best show readers that you care about them.
And I’ll leave you off with one last thing. As authors, we can never forget that: Our stories are what makes us human because our stories are human.
P.S. Much of this reflection was inspired by a great video by Alex Hormozi.