By Michael Evans on July 1, 2023.
Your superfans are not defined by the money they spend.
They are defined by their passion for your stories.
As authors, we all know this— but this is also a tough balance to strike.
Our society demands we make some sort of income from our work to invest into producing our stories and potentially do this full time.
And that income has to come from somewhere… typically our fans.
We share all the time here that your superfans are willing to support you… and they are!
But as Emilia Rose, Pia Ravenari, and others have said before— not every fan has the disposable income to support you by joining a paid membership tier.
that doesn’t mean they won’t support you in other ways! It could be sharing their books with friends, posting about you on social media, or just reading everything you write regardless of the genre or series — they are there for YOU!
So what does this all mean for our paid memberships?
Starting one is valuable, and most of us tend to underprice ourselves because of the very concern I shared above.
However, the beauty of membership tiers in this regard is 3-fold and these 3 things are crucial to remember when thinking about pricing starting and promoting a paid membership to your fans:
1. Each tier is a different price point attuned to a different fan’s ability and willingness to pay.
This means you can have the same benefits at multiple different price points that way fans who want and can support you at a high level (think $30+ per month) are welcome and able to (you could use that support!) but no one is forced to.
2. Your paid membership isn’t the only place to access your stories.
If your subscription model is based around access— this means that when your early access inside your membership is done, your book can then become available in more traditional models that are not direct author to reader.
Most authors are split between three paths
- Path #1: Free on serial fiction platforms.
- Path #2: In KU.
- Path #3. Wide on retailers— and hopefully in libraries as a result.
In all of these models, your stories eventually became accessible to a wide population— and many authors mix and rematch these models.
3. You can utilize gifting to help out readers who are unable to pay for specific experiences/products.
For VIP fan experiences and items (think custom signed books, Merch, etc) it can feel tough to start these often profitable things that give our fans more access, content, and experiences in our stories because of the reasons above.
And it’s nearly impossible to make these things free as an author (shipping ain’t ever free people—someone has to pay for it). In this respect, you can gift these experiences to fans who want to participate but may not be able to afford this.
How can you do so?
One way is to have the ability for readers to gift memberships to one another. Most Subscription platforms do not allow this— however, this is something we are working on.
And another way is to bake this into your business model. You can give away one free membership for every 10 paid members you have. You can set up a program where fans who are unable to join paid tiers can still receive the benefits of let’s say a signed book or Merch after a certain number have already joined your membership.
I recommend something like:
- 5-10% of your revenue from a merch tier goes to a gifting program.
- Maybe you have 10 readers paying $30 a month for merch.
- Your profit after shipping expenses, if you ship merch every quarter, maybe $40 (this is a totally hypothetical example).
- $40 x 10 = $400 in profit per quarter.
- You can then take $40 of that and invest that into giving a fan who didn’t have the opportunity a free piece of that merchandise.
In addition, Christopher Hopper has had great success with similar programs in his membership with fans supporting memberships for one another— this is the power of building a community of your fans in real time!
4. BONUS: Your fans are NOT a monolith.
This is of course in terms of income, but this is also in terms of ethnicity, identity, and religion.
It’s important to make all members of our fandom feel included in places where fans can participate in their passions for our work (think Facebook groups of your fans etc). The last thing you’d want is for a fan who loves your work to not feel included in a space you have created for your fans.
So always make sure to not only cultivate a mindset of acceptance and respect in yourself— but also in your fans. Bad behavior should not be tolerated and we have seen this time and time again with fandoms with certain fans feeling left out.
This is a tough topic — there are no silver-bullet answers here. But it’s not something shy away from.
Balancing our need to profit from our stories while making our fans feel like we are not profiting off them is crucial.
This doesn’t mean to not start a paid membership— quite the opposite— as memberships give you unique opportunities to make these experiences more inclusive.
Now what inspired this post this week? It was news about the Australia leg of the Taylor Swift Tour and the Amex site crashing. Every fandom is a careful balance between supporting a business that keeps the star going and not making your fans feel commodified.
This article dives a bit deep into this with the Swift fandom by Georgie Carroll: On the myth of the “biggest fan”.
I’m turning into a huge fan of fandom studies— especially after reading the great book Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It by Kaitlyn Tiffany.
I hope we can have a guest on the podcast to talk all about this for fiction authors (*fingers crossed that episode can come out soon).
In the meantime, I hope you are all having a wonderful day.
Super excited to hear your thoughts on this one — and would love to hear what you’d like us to write about in the next article.