Subscriptions for Authors: Storytellers Rule the World, #1

By Michael Evans

Get ready to unlock a new stream of revenue and take control of your writing career.

 

In today's turbulent publishing landscape, discover how you can tap into the fast-growing $10 million+ market of subscriptions to generate consistent, recurring income from your core group of readers.

 

This comprehensive book is divided into three parts to help you ideate, market, and make money with your subscription as an author on platforms like Ream, Patreon, Ko-fi, and more.

 

In specific you'll learn:

• How to set up your subscription
• What to offer readers
• How to structure your tiers
• Subscription pricing strategies
• Launching your subscription
• Finding new readers
• Generating sustainable, recurring revenue
• Bonus resources + FAQs

By the end of this book, you'll not only uncover new ways to make money from your writing but also experience a paradigm shift in the power dynamics of publishing, where readers come first and storytellers are in control.

After helping thousands of fiction authors start and grow their subscriptions and co-founding a subscription platform for fiction authors, Michael Evans is sharing all the secrets he's uncovered from how top fiction authors run six-figure subscription businesses.

 

Whether you're a new author or a seasoned pro, Subscriptions for Authors will provide valuable insights to supercharge your career and transform your writing business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ream Press
• Release date: May 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781949458213

Michael Evans

Michael Evans is the author of the Control Freakz Series, a Young Adult Post-Apocalyptic Thriller series set in a near-future United States. He is currently attending high school in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, but he is originally from Long Island, New York. Some of his hobbies include hiking, running, camping, going to the beach, watching and taking artsy pictures of sunsets (it’s honestly a very enlightening activity to partake in), and walking his ginormous, fluffy golden doodle underneath the stars. He is also fascinated with the environment and neuroscience, and his true passion is learning about how the wonders of the human mind and the environment we live in will change with time. The future, specifically his goal of helping to impact the future of humanity positively is what drives him to tell stories. Writing is something that is instinctive to him, and he seeks to express his thoughts on his own life and the world to inspire others to use the power in the voice they have to advocate for positive changes in their own lives and the world we all live in.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION: SUBSCRIPTIONS FOR AUTHORS

I used to think I hated subscriptions.

The idea of starting a subscription as an author? Downright mad.

As a reader and person trapped in our hyper-capitalist dystopia modern society, I avoid subscriptions at all costs.

Subscribe to get new socks and underwear delivered to me each month? I think not.

Subscribe to a fifth streaming service when I just want to watch one stinking movie? Eh, I’ll find something else.

Except, subscriptions are unavoidable.

Internet? Yep, got that. Utilities? That too. Health insurance? In the United States that’s one pricey subscription.

Suddenly you start to see subscriptions everywhere.

But what separates a true subscription from something that we just purchase time and time again? I might not subscribe to get soap delivered to my door, but you bet once I run out, I am going back to the store to buy some more (or maybe not, you wouldn’t know how much I smell through the pages of this book… or maybe you would… ah!).

Well the difference is actually simple.

A subscription bills a customer for a product or service on a recurring basis. This means that once a customer subscribes, they don’t have to enter their payment information again — they are billed automatically.

The rise of internet payment processors and storing financial data securely in the cloud has led to a Cambrian explosion of the subscription economy.

But if we really think about it… what makes the subscription economy that much different from our normal economy?

Don’t we buy books over and over again from our favorite authors?

Don’t we already have all-in-one reader subscription programs that pay out hundreds of millions per year to authors?

In effect, the publishing business is a subscription business. Even if you never chose to have a subscription, your publishing career will live or die on your success at being able to have readers purchase stories from you over and over again.

Sounds simple, but it makes so much sense!

This is why tried and true advice like write multiple books or even writing in series makes sense. It’s why we focus on getting readers to fall in love with the first pages and chapters of our books so they keep on reading and eventually go from book to book of our novels or chapter to chapter of our serials.

Sounds like magic!

But it’s the most essential thing for your publishing career.

I messed this part up.

And it hurt me badly. So badly that I lost all of my savings. Don’t worry this sounds super dramatic, I was okay — I was 18 years old and still living at home.

Not everyone is as lucky as me. With a supportive mom who helped me through that dark time. With no family for me to personally worry about and feed.

I lost it all and came out okay.

Reading this book, if you get anything from it, I want it to be this: publishing is a subscription business, and whether you have a subscription or not, the subscription mindset will help you have a sustainable and profitable career storytelling.

If that’s the main goal of this book, then I’ll share with you what my mindset was as I first began indie publishing back in 2017.

Grow fast. Get as much sales as possible. And write like a mad man.

I remember that time distinctly. I was publishing one book a month, running Facebook Ads part-time, and doing everything I could to get to the top of the charts.

After publishing from 2017 to 2020 and not seeing much sales, I was desperate to make a change. I was scared to market my books and even more scared to try and put myself out there.

But what choice did I have? I wanted to be a full-time author. That meant paying the bills one day somehow!

So I went all-in.

I took the advertising courses. I studied the subgenres of science fiction I was targeting my stories in. And I saved up every penny I col from a job serving at a resort, regularly working 18 hour double-shift days only to come back home exhausted and pressurized to hit my next word count goal.

These were fun days. When all the hope was ahead of me. When all I could see were the stars of my future.

Little did I know, I wasn’t building a home for my future author career.

I was creating a ticking time bomb.

I still remember the day it blew up in my face.

I was when I opened up my credit card that I had put all of my advertising money onto and looked at the balance due in just a week. And then I looked at my bank account. I had just enough to cover it — but barely. And I would be unable to pay my editor and designer for my latest book until the lovely Big River gave me my royalties in another 60 days.

I think this is what we call money problems!

I was stressed. I felt defeated.

There was only one explanation for my failure.

I suck at storytelling.

Part of me still believes this is true! But the truth is that my mindset and strategy was the thing that killed me.

I was just focused on getting sales of book one. Spending endless hours optimizing my cover, blurb, and more to drive up sales ranking as high as possible.

The one thing I missed?

Writing a story that readers want to stick around with book after book. Creating a career that was sustainable and didn’t lead to me burning out. Nuturing my existing readers and marketing later books in my series outside of a lazy launch email sent in 10 minutes the day of the book release.

In short, I was spending time on the wrong things. My author life was out of balance.

I would like to say this story has a happy ending.

First, the story still is ongoing. And secondly, I had many low moments after my first run in with burning thousands of dollars in the dungeon of Facebook Ads.

I ended up starting a YouTube channel and gaining 9,000 subscribers in 10 weeks. I focused all my efforts on creating clickable titles and thumbnails but didn’t retain my audience video over video. Binge sessions are the #1 thing that the YouTube algorithm wants to see and with no one binging my content but instead viewing and dashing… my channel quickly lost steam.

I finally woke up and realized that I have a #toxictrait.

I treat social media algorithms like a slot machine and forget about creating stories that connect with real people. I was looking for validation in the forms of views and likes so badly that I forgot about the real reason we all write stories. To do something we love.

I had turned my storyteller journey into something I hated.

And I was searching for a way out. Contacting every publishing start-up I could to see who was trying to build a healthier, more sustainable ecosystem that gives authors power and control.

That’s when I met Emilia Rose. She is a best-selling steamy romance author who was making six-figures per year doing something I found almost unthinkable.

She had her own reader subscription.

Readers were paying her anywhere from $5 to even $100 per month to get access to her stories, exclusive book boxes, and more.

Suddenly, she had an audience where she didn’t need to worry about pleasing an algorithm and new sales to make a living. She just had to make her existing readers happy and continue growing in a way that is sustainable for her.

This blew my mind. I thought, there’s no way other authors can be succeeding doing this?

Welp, I was wrong.

There were hundreds of fiction authors succeeding in subscriptions collectively making $20 million+ per year. They spanned genres, strategies, and price points.

But they all had one thing in common — paying readers who stuck with them month after month.

We started to study these authors, created a Facebook Group that is now the home to over 5,000 subscription authors and even run a virtual summit hosting the top subscription authors in the world.

So what awaits us in our adventure today?

Today I will be breaking down exactly how you can start and grow a successful subscription business as a fiction author with insights learned from helping thousands of fiction authors start and grow their subscriptions and make millions of dollars per year.

What is this?

This guide is roughly 140 pages long or 34,000 words. It should take you anywhere from 2 to 3 hours to read. It aims to be a sweet spot between a short article that leaves you with more questions than answers and an entire book that takes a week to read, while providing a comprehensive introduction to subscriptions for authors.

This guide contains three parts:

Ideation and Planning Your Subscription. This is all about setting up the foundation of your subscription from what to offer your readers to how to structure your tiers, pricing your subscription, and setting up your subscription.

Marketing, Managing, and Making Money with Your Subscription. This is the meat of the guide. This is where we dive into how you can launch your subscription, find new readers, and ultimately generate sustainable, recurring revenue.

Subscription Principles, Bonus Resources, FAQs, and more. This section includes some of the big takeaways from the guide, including a list of free resources to learn more about subscriptions and some common questions we often get about subscriptions.

What you will discover by the end of this is that subscriptions aren’t just a way to make more money from your writing and build stronger connections with your readers, but a complete shift in the power dynamics of publishing that puts readers first and storytellers in control.

Who is it for?

This guide is primarily made for authors who are interested in starting subscriptions or who are just beginning with this business model. Whether you are an author making $100k+ per year who is new to the world of subscriptions or someone who is new to the world of writing in