How to build a sustainable and profitable subscription into your author business
Having consistent income every month helps create safety for authors, but how can we build that recurring revenue when it feels impossible to get anyone interested in peeking behind the paywall.
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Hi friends,
Today we’re talking about how to build a sustainable membership into the core of your author business. I recommend these three pieces to give this one more context.
I didn’t start feeling comfortable in my business until I began seeing consistent, recurring revenue inside of it. For years, my sales were 100% launch-based. I would gobble up a ton of money in short bursts, and then watch it slowly wither back down to nothing before the next launch.
It was a nightmare because I could never plan for the future. Even when I was launching five times a year, I didn’t feel safe investing in the future because every launch was still filled with uncertainty.
For years, I tried to set up some form of subscription income, and always fell flat. I ran a Patreon in years past. I tried Ko-Fi and Buy Me a Coffee. I tested Kickstarter's short-lived Drip subscription platform. I even built an app to showcase my work. Nothing worked until I found Substack.
This is not a pitch for Substack or any specific platform. It’s just a demonstration of how hard it is to set up a subscription that gains traction. Sure, some of it was the platform, but by the time I found that success I had significantly grown my audience with
for the better part of two years and had spent the last 15 years blogging and working with creators, not to mention growing my back catalog.In my opinion, subscriptions are the hardest business model to get right, the hardest to get started, and the one with the highest upside if you can get the mechanics to work for you.
That said, I think most authors focus too hard on growing their subscription base in the short term instead of building it into their overall business model as a long-term engine for growth. Subscriptions will break your heart if you look at them as a short-term play instead of a long-term development. More than any other direct sales income stream, subscriptions should be measured across years instead of days, weeks, or months.
Internet marketing legend and Clickfunnels founder Russell Brunson calls subscriptions ”the lynchpin” of his business because it runs underneath, and is critically important to, everything else they do. For years, Brunson gave away a year of Clickfunnels to people who bought any of his other products. He used the immediate need for his course material to entice people to spend money in the short term and then used that material as a way to train people to use his product and build his recurring revenue in the long term.
Doing that allowed him to invest money back into marketing and grow his business to $30 million in annual revenue within a couple of years. Authors don’t have $1,000 products in the same way Brunson does, but there’s no reason they can’t include either a free trial of their membership with every purchase of their product or offer it as a special add-on when somebody buys from their direct sales store.
Yes, this means whatever platform you use has to allow for couponing (unless you set up your subscription on your web store), but when I started my Substack I comped my entire email list a 90-day subscription that allowed them to see what I offered behind my paywall. I built my membership over 300 members in the first eight months using that strategy.
Another strategy I think could benefit authors is to run PBS-style pledge drives throughout the year. Even though you can donate to PBS throughout the year, they push hard during certain times of the year with telethons, special bonuses, and an intense focus on showing the value they provide.
Similarly, even though you should offer your paid membership throughout the year, consider designing a “pledge drive” when you first go paid (with a sweet yearly discount for paid subscribers) to build the critical mass necessary to devote time to your membership. Offer special pins, prints, or other bonuses for people who join during this special time, and try to get other creators with similar audiences to create a fun experience with you.
The hardest part of running a membership for paid subscribers is that whether there is one person or a thousand people behind a paywall, you have to do the work.
Once you have the initial drive complete, plan regular events to gather new members and convert free subscribers to paid ones. This has the added benefit of reminding your paid members why they subscribed in the first place to lower people dropping their subscriptions.
One of the biggest problems creators have with going paid is that they feel like they have to always be on, but if you confine your ask to certain times of the year, then you can concentrate on the work of creating most of the year.
*** Please note that if you are reading this via email, Substack only sent out a partial version and the article will eventually stop without notice. If you want to read the whole 3,500-word article, then go to this website. or download the app. Additionally, unlike most of my articles, this has a paywall in the middle. I think it’s still a good value until then, but fair warning.***
What is a subscription?
A subscription is when somebody pays you consistently for something, in an author’s case that something is usually book, or at least publishing, related.
, co-founder of Ream, says that authors have been running subscription businesses since the dawn of publishing. After all, our goal is to get readers to continue to read our work month after month, year after year. Now, we are just formalizing this process and taking control of the narrative in a way we never have been able to before by building our own membership.A subscription gradually builds over time but requires a lot of time before it is successful.
Often subscription businesses talk about “hockey stick growth” which is the moment when their investment of time and resources starts to pay off and their membership income starts to look like a vertical line instead of a horizontal one. The problem is that nobody can tell you exactly when that moment will come. It might be in three months or three years. Meanwhile, you have to deliver every month even if you only have one subscriber.
Subscriptions allow you to build predictable money every month, test out products with dedicated fans, build an even deeper relationship with readers, and monetize your process earlier and with less refinement. That said, it’s hard to get people to back unless they are superfans. You will likely have to offer enticement bonuses, free trials, or discounts to convince people to give your membership a try.
Usually, members of your subscription spend less money per month than they would during a book launch, but they spend it over a longer period. That said, “longer” does not mean forever, and one of the biggest problems with subscriptions is churn, or people canceling their membership.
We can endeavor to keep them happy by delivering consistent high-quality content and showing them the value of what we provide, but the average subscriber will spend somewhere between six months and three years in your membership before churning, depending on how good you are at retention.
There are hundreds of platforms to build your subscription business, but the most popular are Ream, Substack, Patreon, Ko-fi, and Buy Me a Coffee. You can also release chapter by chapter on Wattpad, Radish, Royal Road, Kindle Vella, and more, but you do not own the data.
Each of these platforms has negatives and positives associated with time I’ve talked about before, but I would recommend Ream for most fiction authors and Substack for most non-fiction authors.
You might even consider “going wide” with your membership and syndicating it across multiple platforms. Different people like different platforms, and it might make sense to gather subscribers on multiple and cross-post between them.
Most readers already have a favorite platform, and it might not even take that long to make this happen. You could think about having a main post on one platform and then have an assistant post on the other platforms and handle comments. Depending on the platform, you might be able to use Zapier or Pabbly to do this, too.
Three low-stress membership models
While there are infinite ways to make a membership work for you, I wanted to highlight three models that work well for most authors just getting started.
In the early release model, you give your subscribers access to chapters before anyone else gets them. This is very easy if you are already writing and releasing books and you can release these pre-edited as well. You might think that nobody would pay for your pre-edited work, but how much would you pay for your favorite author’s first drafts? This might seem like an egotistical question, but to your members, you are one of their favorite authors. They can’t hang out with Stephen King or Neil Gaiman, but they can hang out with you, which is pretty cool.
In the additional content model, you create brand-new material for your fans. This can be great for slow writers who have a dedicated fandom, or people who like deep world-building. Maybe you show off little vignettes you created to develop characters or lore baked into your books. This of The Silmarillion or The World of Ice and Fire, and you get a sense of what kind of material you would create under this model.
In the access model, you give members special access to you. This could come in the form of secret chats with your subscribers, hosted live streams every month, or special events for them to enjoy. This is perfect for authors who are energized by being around their fans and have a larger-than-life personality. Readers love hanging out with authors and getting to pick their brains.
You’ll likely do all of these, but choose one of these to start and build from there depending on which feels right to you.
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