Growth Marketing versus Subscription Marketing
By Michael Evans May 26, 2024
Let me set the scene.
You’ve been offered a $1 million dollar advance by a Big Four publisher.
For the last few years, you have been creating videos on TikTok.
Started out with a few hundred followers until you swelled to tens of thousands and eventually millions.
Your secret sauce? You are incredible at replicating trends and putting your own spin on it.
A maestro in fact.
Why couldn’t you do the same thing with books?
Secretly you’ve always wanted to be considered a “real artist”.
You know how mainstream media looks at TikTokkers— putting us down, even calling us amateurs.
But a big best-selling book would change that.
Everyone will know that you are the real deal.
That you made it.
Let’s pause our story here and play a little game.
As we will soon find out our story here is far from fictional. It features love, drama, lying to fans, and more.
But. Let’s engage in a thought experiment
Let’s say you have 30 million followers on social media. When you launch your book, how much do you think you will make in the first month?
Put your guess in the comments down below. Remember if just 1% of people buy anything you release you are looking at 300,000 sales. If 1 in 1,000 converts, 30,000 sales.
You get the idea. It’s not hard to imagine how you can make a life-changing amount of money with that number of followers. After all— you did score a $1 million advance from a publisher.
But what if… what if… things didn’t go according to plan.
For Chase Hudson, that’s exactly what happened.
Chase Hudson is a TikTokker with 30 million followers. He’s famous for viral dance moves and being the ex of Charli D’amelio, one of the largest Tiktokkers on the planet.
Chase Hudson may not be an author— but us storytellers can learn a lot from him. He created hit songs that have collectively garnered 100 million streams on Spotify.
And instead of his big launch being a best-selling book… it was a subscription for his fans to get more access to him and his life.
In fact, he was rumored to be paid a $1 million advance by Patreon to create on the platform.
The deal failed horrifically.
Chase Hudson, who goes by the moniker Lil Huddy made just over $2,600 during the first month of his subscription according to insider.
$2,600. On Ream, we have regularly seen authors with a following a fraction the size of his (we are talking well under 1% of his size) have bigger first launch months then that.
It’s easy to dismiss this as…
“TikTok followers just aren’t valuable.”
That’s anything but the truth.
I’ve seen mailing lists of 25,000+ readers with few to none converting to paid members. I’ve seen best-selling authors who make seven figures per year struggle to make $100 a month in their subscription.
And then I’ve seen authors who make $1,000 a month in their entire publishing business make hundreds of dollars a month in their subscription.
What calls for this discrepancy?
Why do some authors and creators have incredible conversion to products like subscription, merch, and more, while other creators see crickets when they launch?
For Chase Hudson… the crickets turned to sirens.
On his $8 tier, he promised a monthly livestream to fans.
After “issues” with his live-streaming service, he discontinued the benefit with little warning to his fans and without downgrading or refunding anyone for the benefit they didn’t get.
In short — he didn’t follow through on his promises.
And his fans got angry.
Many of the ones who subscribed started commenting on his posts and even making posts of their own sharing how they felt cheated.
This entire scenario is indicative of the larger problem in Chase Hudson’s business.
He never had a real relationship with his fans — and never went the extra mile to imagine what an amazing experience would look like for them.
Here’s what I mean…
Point #1: His tiers were generic. They were benefits that “anyone” could offer. Livestreams and chatting with fans are “fine” but in a world in which it feels like every personality has started a subscription of some form, there is nothing special or unique about his subscription that would make fans excited.
This can make the entire event feel like a money grab and damage trust with fans — which the failed promises only accentuated.
Point #2: He was inspired by an external force and the promise of money. This ultimately led to him creating a subscription that did NOT fit his audience.
Instead of reflecting on if a subscription was right for him and the best product for him to launch — Chase accepted a very enticing deal with a third-party platform. In the end, everyone ended up hurt. When you decide if subscriptions or any new endeavor is for you, you must follow your excitement and put the needs of your readers first.
In Chase’s case, he may have been better launching a merch brand, CPG brand (think coffee brand, yes, you can do this now online and it’s awesome), or just doubled down on his music (it seems like he’s died down quite a bit from his peak in music and has 400,000 monthly listeners on Spotify.
Point #3: Chase never had a super warm audience of fans ready to experience their fandom for him. The truth is a huge part of why Chase Hudson got popular was for his relationship to Charli D’Amelio. Followers can be an extremely useful metric, but HOW you got those followers and built a relationship with them is what matters.
Regardless of how big his launch was and how much of a marketing push he put behind it, he never really nurtured a deep connection with his audience after gaining tens of millions from viral dance trends and high-profile dating life. This isn’t that dissimilar to writing in Kindle Unlimited, following a hot trend and getting to a very high sales ranking.
That is beautiful, but how can you translate that to a sustainable business? It all comes down to building a core base of superfans. Retaining your readers. And that’s what subscription marketing is all about.
In fact, the BIGGEST reason Followers can be a poor metric (as well as even newsletter subscribers) for determining subscription success is because they measure a size of someone’s casual readership.
Casual readers are typically gained through Growth Marketing efforts — or ways that you reach cold audiences and acquire “new leads” for your business.
This mostly comes in the form of ads, content marketing, and collaborations with other authors.
Subscription Marketing is all about turning casual readers into superfans and having superfans stick around with you once they are there.
In this group, our core focus has been Subscription Marketing — and likely will always be (hence the name).
One of the core misunderstandings about subscriptions is the simple question… what kind of marketing are you engaging in?
Growth Marketing has very different rules from Subscription Marketing.
And if the FIRST time you are ever doing any form of Subscription Marketing is when you first press launch on your paid subscription… it’s no wonder that maybe your subscription launch will start more like Chase’s than not.
But the good news… is that it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Unlike Chase, you can double down on Subscription Marketing and convert your casual readers into raving superfans.
Now of course, you can’t have a world-class subscription marketing strategy WITHOUT a growth marketing strategy to complement it.
Over the next few months, I plan to share A LOT more about growth marketing. To build a long-lasting publishing business you need BOTH. But for 90%+ of authors, it all starts with your beginning growth marketing activities.
But as a takeaway to help you end up in a better position than Chase Hudson for your subscription launch, here are 4 principles of subscription marketing (and if you are interested in reading more, check out the Subscription marketing guide we wrote, linked below 
).
#1: Whether your reader is a paid subscriber of yours or not, they are “subscribing” to you by choosing to stick around and get future updates and stories from you. Publishing is a subscription business at its core even if people don’t subscribe with their credit/debit cards.
#2: Subscription marketing is less about sales and more about relationships. You can use Author Personas as a quick way to filter what relationship you might want to have with your readers. This isn’t about your personal relationship. It’s about building trust — the core of any relationship.
#3: Subscription marketing is all about your brand. Let your voice shine through. If you “commoditize” yourself by doing the exact same thing as everyone else, then you make it for your fans to leave you for everyone else. And subscription marketing is all about retaining your readers!
#4: Subscription marketing is about constant change and improvements. The biggest change and improvement you can give your readers is another story. The old adage that your next story is the best way to market your last one will always ring true. Don’t forget to keep writing amazing stories. Arielle Bailey will be creating a lot more craft-related content soon because our community desperately needs someone sharing amazing craft advice (and I know that person is not me, I’m way too much of a business and technology geek).
And that’s it from me for this one! I hope you enjoyed it… and a huge shoutout to those who guessed Chase’s *reported income from the publication Insider* correctly on the last poll.
As always, don’t forget…
Storytellers Rule the World 