Hello Subscription Authors 👋,
It’s Michael, here, with some big updates, key lessons, and insights on the future of this community and Ream platform.
This is my end-of-year letter. I wrote a similar letter last year, and this year’s is going to be very fun.
This letter will have 3 parts:
- Updates you can expect on Ream, including a big update about Discovery.
- Updates you can expect in the SFA community — the theme of this year is Doubling Down, which I’ll explain.
- Some key lessons + insights from me learned over the last year. These will be “First Principles” based, meaning that the frameworks and lessons I share are less one-time flash-in-the-pan ideas but long-standing lessons you can hopefully learn from.
Note: I mention a lot of different projects and resources in this year-in-review. You can find them all on our LinkTree here.
Let’s get into it…
Part 1: The Second Launch of Ream with Discovery + A Renewed Product Philosophy
Very soon, discovery is launching. We don’t want to give an exact date yet because quality assurance + ironing out bugs can sometimes take longer than expected — but I fully expect Discovery 1.0 on Ream to be live around 14 days from now.
This is a big update and one we have been working on for nearly 90 days. Sean Patnode is incredible with all the work he’s done leading Ream’s development.
We have been hyping up this update for a long time.
And I’ll be honest… it’s way better than I originally thought it would be.
And that’s because of Sean Patnode, Arielle Bailey, and the rest of the team dedicated to getting it right.
They taught me something important.
When I initially planned out our roadmap for Q4, I was thinking of discovery more like a feature. We could do something small, simple, and take a little step forward in providing discovery on the platform.
Sean Patnode and Emilia Rose disagreed. Soon after we started working on discovery in October, they realized that if we were going to do this, we had to do this right.
Ream isn’t just a little platform in beta with 100 people on it. There are tens of thousands of readers on Ream and thousands upon thousands of fiction authors.
We needed to create something that could really wow people. A better system for discovery, rebuilding the experience from the ground up.
In this way, Discovery became more than just a feature, it’s an entirely new “product” within the ecosystem of the Ream platform.
That’s why now this is our biggest update yet, both in terms of time, scope, and impact in helping all of you take your author careers to the next level.
Most start-up advice is to build fast, test and test and test, and eventually, you’ll get something right.
Sean and Emilia taught me that advice is not the most helpful for us.
Instead, we can take a new approach — a better one.
Share our plans openly with you all. Take feedback in as we build it, and then use that not to rush out a half-baked draft but something truly incredible.
Working together with the community over the last few months, we have received comments from hundreds of you and private conversations with dozens more. We are privileged to be able to have you all in our community. And as a result, we believe Community is King.
This update is something you all created with us. And the system for tagging + categorizing stories on Ream is now more robust than it’s ever been.
IT’S THE SECOND LAUNCH OF THE REAM PLATFORM. AND IT WILL BE TAKING SUBSCRIPTION PLATFORMS FOR FICTION AUTHORS TO AN ENTIRELY NEW LEVEL.
So with Discovery launching so soon, what can we expect on Ream after that?
- Updates to make the Ream story publishing scheduler more usable as well as some usability fixes across the site. With all focus on discovery over the last 3 months, Ream needs some beautifying to make small improvements that when added together make a big difference.
- Importing ePubs on Ream! Wohoo! Google Drive will still be available to import from and of course you can copy and paste too. But we believe ePub importing will help a lot!
- Audiobooks on Ream. This is our next big update beyond discovery. Originally, I was hoping this would release in very early 2024 or late 2023. It looks like the end of Quarter 1 into early Quarter 2 (think March or April) is more realistic for this update. We want to get audio really right on the platform too and Sean Patnode is dedicated to building not just another place to listen to audiobooks, but a social audio experience unlike anything else for readers on the internet. We can’t wait for it, and in late January, will start sharing that process openly with you 💜.
How about for the rest of the year, this is only the first few months?
I won’t be releasing an official roadmap for the year. Mostly because, we want to underpromise and overdeliver, and as a small team that first and foremost listens to the needs of our authors and readers, we want to be adaptable to change.
But a few updates you can expect in the calendar year include:
- Improvements to email sending on Ream including email customization, importing of reader emails into Ream, and more!
- Updates to the community on Ream, including moderators, admins, + PAs within your Ream, public Community posts, and more!
- Better analytics, including page reads, post views, and more.
- Annual subscriptions!
After speaking with hundreds of you and reading thousands of emails, comments, and forum posts from you, we feel like we have a really good grasp of the areas we can continue making the platform better.
In 2023, Ream became the best subscription platform in the world for fiction authors.
In 2024, our goal is simple.
We want to double down on making subscriptions better on Ream (everything from Discovery to publishing to community and more) so that Ream is 10x better than anywhere else in the world for fiction authors to create a membership for their readers.
That goal^ is simple and it guides our entire strategy in 2024. And I hope that by the end of the year, most of the big feature requests and improvements you all want to see on the site can be implemented. At this point, Ream will be entering a bit more of a mature phase. We will still be a young start-up, but 2025 will mark a new chapter in Ream’s history… but I’m getting ahead of myself.
This is part 1. Your update on Ream and where it’s headed.It’s incredible how much the Ream Team has taught me. From Sean Patnode’s incredible dedication to building an amazing experience on the platform from Bobbie Community Support’s undying commitment to answering your questions and helping support you all, to Patrick McCarville leading Author Success and pioneering a first of it’s kind Migrations Program and soon-to-be-announced VIP Launches that make starting and moving to Ream easier than ever, to Arielle Bailey creating an entirely new system for how story discovery works on the internet.
I am just a very happy and grateful messenger of the collection of insights, passion, and creations of an incredible group of people. And that group of people includes ALL of you since it is your passion and energy that we are channeling in the first place. With this said, let’s now move on to Part 2 — What You Can Expect in Subscriptions for Authors.
Part 2: Subscriptions for Authors: The Year of Doubling Down
This is the theme for the *entire year* in 2024, but it is truly not more evident than in Subscriptions for Authors.
In a Year-In-Review Post, I’ll share tomorrow on social media (with some juicy stats and progress this community has made), you will notice an unbelievable amount of new initiatives launched in this community.
The strategy was simple. We need to build the foundation for the best author community on the planet that can grow and be refined over the next decade-plus.
This meant creating things like the Storytellers Rule the World Award Show, a Merch Store that Funds a Game Show for Authors, bringing on board the All-Stars to help us run the group, hosting a Subscription Summit (and this year will be experimenting with a more robust group of virtual summits), hosting Quarterly Mixers, continuing the Fireside Chats, Podcast, and Blog, and launching things like Author Personas, the SFA Bootcamp, 12 Days of SFA, the Industry Report, the Storytellers Rule the World Grant… and more. We even launched a Six-Figure Subscription Accelerator Course… Wowza!
It’s basically Disney World for Authors. In fact, I even drew out a very extensive synergy map that plots out how the entire SFA ecosystem works together to help serve authors in a multitude of ways.
The truth is that the foundation is now built.
2024 will not be full of tons of brand-new releases of new content programs and initiatives. Instead, we will be doubling down on making everything we do better.
This mostly means scaling beyond me. It’s no secret that I do a lot of the work behind the scenes to keep the community running, and the last 3 months have shown me that we have hit my limit. In 2024, we will be bringing on Anna McCluskey and Arielle Bailey to continue taking a larger lead in this community.
You’ll still see me around, A LOT. But it’s not sustainable for a community of 5,000+ authors (this group has grown 5x in the past year) to be supported by the work of one passionate person who also happens to be the CEO of Ream 😅.
What this means is that Anna McCluskey will begin transitioning into a leadership role in this community over the next 6-12 months.
It will take time. On the back end, I’m building systems that help manage how we release content and work with others so that Anna McCluskey can work with our amazing group of Subgroup leaders, the All-Stars, and even Renata Perez who does so much of our social media and podcast work behind the scenes.
In short, how we double down and make SFA even better is by furthering our existing initiatives, creating consistent, awesome educational experiences for all of you (such as continued podcasts), and scaling beyond me as the bottleneck in so much of what we do.
I’ll still be hosting the podcast (I plan to do so far far into the future), and I’ll still be doing the Fireside Chats with Emilia Rose until June of 2024. And, of course, you will see me at all the events we run like the Summit and Award Show.
But increasingly, you will be seeing more of some fantastic faces that are already probably very familiar to you all.
This is a good thing.
I’m extremely future-oriented — and secretly, from the beginning of SFA, we had a succession plan to usher in new leadership that could be more focused on the day-to-day, and do an even better job than us.
I’m sharing this with you so early so that you all know how important this is to me.
Every day I feel guilty that I couldn’t be doing more, being more consistent etc. But sometimes important issues come to my desk, that only I can deal with. I need to be here to lead the larger ecosystem that we are creating, and Anna, and Arielle, among others, will be here to lead SFA.
There will be an official moment where I “hand off” the reigns. I’m not ready for that yet. But that is likely the single biggest change to expect in this community in 2024 — and it will ensure the sustainability of this community long into the future while making it a better experience for all of you.
Now onto part 3, some of my lessons learned. Up to this point, you now know the big roadmap of plans and changes and some of the exciting things coming.
Part 3: 5 Lessons from 2023: The Year That Changed Everything
In the history of publishing, we will look back at 2023 as being a pivotal year. The year that the big retailers started to lose their power as authors and readers began to shift to a new ecosystem.
In the history of my life… this was and will be the most pivotal year. We started this year off with Sean Patnode quitting his job to go all-in on Ream before we even launched into beta as I entered the last semester of my junior year of college.
From day one we have been a bootstrapped team doing everything in our power to build a better publishing future for fiction authors, by fiction authors, with fiction authors.
We are ending the year off with a team of incredible people (all of whom I have featured in this post), honors from amazing people like Jane Friedman naming us start-up of the year, and a year of memories, friendships, and adventures that I’ll treasure for the rest of my life.
We started 2023 with the confidence that Ream could work and that we could work with you all to create something special. We leave 2023 knowing that this will be the space we spend the rest of the decade working on.
After 7 years of working in this industry, I finally feel like I found my home. I can’t thank you all enough for that. And on June 1st, when I graduate college and officially become a full-time member of Ream (at least legally speaking lol), it will be the best day of my life.
With the cheesy stuff out of the way, I want to dive into these 5 lessons that have all been life-changing and realized through this experience over the last year.
Lesson #1: Community is King. I started 2023 in a hard spot. Ream was going into beta and that experience was awesome, but a hard break-up made it so that I felt more lonely than ever in college.
3 moments really changed everything for me this year in building my own personal community.
(a) the Subscriptions for Authors Summit. Seeing this community come to life was the most special thing and allowed me to begin building closer relationships with so many people in this community. That eventually led to us hiring our early team entirely from people who have been in this community for the last 1 – 2 years. That’s… unbelievably special, and being able to have a close-knit group of people to work and lead this community with has been life-changing for me.
(b) I nurtured a community of fellow creatives from all different industries and backgrounds. This was mostly from my participation in Creator Camp, and if I wasn’t traveling to an author conference on the weekend, I was often traveling to meet the friends I made through Creator Camp. Being around a group of fellow 20-somethings trying to navigate the world as creators and make a career out of it has been life-changing.
(c) The Prod community. It’s a group of technology founders in college that meet every week for dinner and we go on retreats together where we hack away at building our companies. To be with people on a shared journey as me that we can help build each other up has been incredible and has made me come out of a year that started lonely feeling more belonging, love, and happiness in my life than ever.
I encourage you all to build your own personal community ecosystem. It supercharges everything and makes life so much more meaningful.
And as a note to this community, we are taking your feedback more seriously than ever in building a better publishing future… which is why last night I shared the Ream Republic experiment on my personal Facebook profile well over a year before we’d even consider implementing it to get your feedback and make it better.
Which huge thank you to everyone who contributed.
Lesson #2: Focus is everything. This one we have learned time and time again. Luckily, hyperfocus is one of my superpowers 😅. In all seriousness, keeping Ream and this community focused on subscriptions has been a superpower in being able to do more and better for all of you.
But focus extends beyond vision – it goes to the day-to-day. I’ve continually realized the importance of bringing people around you that can continue focusing on specific areas such as a cover designer, an editor, or anyone else that you collaborate with, so that you can focus on the things that you are best at and most likely to drive your mission forward. This ties nicely into our next lesson…
Lesson #3: You can’t be the CEO of your author business if you are always in player mode. This one is a huge one I’ve had to learn this year. The big-picture thinking and ideas are where I’m at my best.
In a small business that is in its early days, we often find ourselves doing a bit of everything. That is okay… except… it can’t last forever. And I believe you should learn to delegate sooner than you are comfortable with, especially as authors.
However, delegating can mean different things in different situations. There are three ways to delegate.
1. Build a system and process that a person can take over.
2. Utilize software or other technology to do the work for you.
3. Cross it off your to-do list and delegate it to the future.
#3 is by far the most powerful. As a small business, you may not have the cash to buy software or hire other people to help.
Heck, although our team has grown, we constantly have more to do than our resources can handle.
That is the nature of being in a creative business where we have a vision, passion, and so much to do.
How do you know what to delegate?
It’s simple — if it doesn’t energize you, it’s probably a good idea to bring someone in to help with it. Most of the things I do in a day energize me, it’s why I have so much energy.
Practice writing in a journal everything you do in a week and write next to it whether you feel more or less energized before or after.
That’s a pretty good list to start with delegating, and then you can decide whether to delegate to software/technology, humans, or the future.
An example of something that doesn’t energize me is emails. I work in great periods of hyperfocus where I regularly lock myself away for 2-3 days to get something done. I’m not a routine person at much of anything, and checking emails routinely is not my strength.
This often means I get behind. This “getting behind” really started to build up this semester with my personal and admin emails. This is when I knew I needed to bring on an Executive Assistant, which is one of the many hats Arielle Bailey wears.
Note: By the way, I’m still behind on like 100 emails from the last month, but I will catch up, and once the backlog is done, Arielle will be helping me keep things in check since that’s just not something that energizes me or plays to my nature of being.
And one last framework for you. If you are all the CEOs of your author business, there are multiple hats you can be wearing (note: this is adapted from the book The Lazy CEO, which is a great read!).
There’s the Creator hat when you are in drafting mode.
The Player hat when you are in the weeds doing things related to marketing, publishing, and more.
The Learner hat, when you are reading, listening to industry podcasts, and getting more insights in how to run your business.
The Architect Hat is when you are planning out the future and strategizing or building better systems for your publishing business.
My guess is you spend most of your time in the Creator hat and Player hat. I’d recommend spending 25% of your time between the Architect hat and Learner hat, 25% as a Player, and 50% as a Creator.
Lesson #4: The greatest “hack” is creating something amazing. This is the greatest thing. It’s something I’ve learned over and over again this year, and wanted to emphasize even more as we roll out new features on Ream that are truly amazing and not just “another update”.
With things like Author Personas or the first Summit in 2023, we put a lot of time and energy into creating an amazing experience, and those events and activities basically “marketed themselves”. It’s hard work creating something amazing, and it oftentimes DOES NOT come in the first draft.
The first draft of Author Personas delivered 50% of people unhelpful results.
The Summit was only done after we had already done 10+ live events and learned many lessons.
Creating something great takes time, but sticking with it and having a relentless pursuit of bettering your craft is the key. And this is where we get to our last lesson…
Lesson #5: Rome wasn’t built overnight. This is the most important lesson I can share with all of you. Things take time. Growing a readership, growing a platform, improving your craft. I know I’ve emphasized this lesson before.
Most days, it doesn’t feel like Ream is really growing. Most days I wake up and it’s just another day.
But then you look back after just 7+ months since launching and go wow… support requests are up by 500%, account growth is up by a similar amount… and it’s all just been a very consistent trend upward. When you give something enough time and remain dedicated to the process, great things happen.
And the truth is 7 months isn’t even close to a long time. After 7 years at the turn of the decade in 2030, then I think it will be getting close to a “long time” and we can start to see what this will truly become. Imagine if you thought about your author business on the same timeline, not 7 days, or 7 weeks, or even 7 months, but 7 years? It’s been 7 years of me dedicating nearly every free waking hour to my pursuit of being a storyteller.
And even after 7 years, I still feel like I’m at the beginning.
Phew! That is it from me. I know this is a really long update, but I wanted to share with you some details of where we are going and some lessons we’ve learned along the way.
You are all the best and we couldn’t be more grateful to pursue this together with all of you. Let’s keep making life for subscription authors better and better in 2024. And with that, I hope you all have an amazing end of the year.
And don’t forget…
Storytellers Rule the World
With 💜,
Michael and the Ream Team