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.
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 Monica Leonelle 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.
Michael Evans, 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.
Getting your publication ready for prime time
The number one thing that every writer can do better to improve their subscription is with better graphic design and making their page more aesthetically pleasing to visitors. So many subscriptions look bad to potential subscribers, especially in the cover imagery, and it immediately turns them off.
The reason I got traction in publishing was because I cared about my books looking as good as anything the Big 5 publishers put out. For some reason, authors understand how to make their books appealing to readers but have trouble translating those same skills to their subscriptions.
Most books that succeed have a base layer of quality to them where people can say “Yup, that’s a book and it looks like it won’t fall apart on me. The author looks like they can complete a story.”
If you don’t have that, people won’t buy your book. Just because you have that doesn’t mean they will buy it, of course, but if you don’t have that they almost certainly won’t give you a chance to earn their attention.
Even if they will buy either way, your job as a creator who wants to grow is to remove as many points where people can say no as possible. Any time somebody is given the choice to turn away, they likely will. We call this friction.
I like to say books can be “objectively good” and “subjectively not your jam”. They are two different metrics. Same with subscriptions. If somebody can’t look at your publication and believe it is objectively good, then they will never stick around to decide if it is subjectively their jam.
Objective goodness is a metric that is the same across all books. Whether the cover is pleasing, if it reads well without a lot of errors, if the binding is sturdy, if it conforms to the format of a book, etc. We all know what a book should look like when we pick it up, and if a book doesn’t look like that, we are less inclined to try it out because it doesn’t mean the base level of professionalism we expect.
The same is true with your membership. It has to look professional or people will turn away before giving it a chance.
That said, while I believe all my books reach an objective level of goodness, readers subjectively prefer some over others. Something can be objectively good and subjectively not your jam. Arguably, all of marketing is just showing people a bunch of things they might like and letting them decide which ones are their jam.
One of the best ways to overcome rejection is by understanding people who say no aren’t saying your work is bad. They are just saying it’s not their jam, which is totally reasonable and much easier to swallow, along with being true.
Are they not stopping, not clicking, or not converting?
There are three big friction points you need to smooth out before you start getting traction for your subscription. Each of these points will make people turn away from your publication. Basically, you need to figure out if people are not stopping their scroll to check you out, if they are not clicking to read more once they stop, or if they are not converting into subscribers. We used to call this the three snaps because you’re trying to wake people up and notice you.
If they aren’t stopping, then you have a design problem. It means your imagery/text is not exciting enough to make the reader stop scrolling. This is the hardest part of the equation, honestly.
If they aren’t clicking, it means you have a messaging problem. Perhaps you have a great image, but the headline isn’t something your audience cares about, bores them, or something else in the messaging is preventing somebody from clicking.
If they aren’t converting, then it means you are targeting the wrong people, or your text isn’t crisp enough to get them excited. It could also be that you don’t have enough places to join your email list throughout your article. Also, don’t design every article for the same person, but the same kind of person. Everyone is going to find you at different places in their journey. You are technically the same person at every age but you are very different, too. So, is your reader.
Once you fix those problems, you should be able to reliably get people into your subscription. It’s not worth it to start scaling before you can fix these three problems. If you want to learn more about this, then read Help! My Facebook Ads Suck.
It helps to picture the design elements of a page that may be holding people back from diving into your publication.
Once you have a banger publication that looks great, then it’s really about bringing people into your subscription environment. Before this point, your efforts likely won’t bear much fruit. Now that you have the rest of your publication on fleek, you should start getting people you meet excited to join your community.
Developing a brand identity
How do we get readers past the friction points I defined above? The biggest part of it is about defining your brand identity.
Those words elicit groans from most authors I talk to, but a brand is nothing more than the promise you make to your readers that allows them to fall in love with your work.
Some authors have a very tight topic they write about, like Anne Rice. I know exactly what emotion I will get from her work every single time. Other authors, like David Sedaris, talk about a wide range of topics and I follow him for the unique way he looks at a wide range of topics.
Both of these authors have a great brand and a strong voice, but they go about defining their brands in very different ways.
I mean, can’t you just close your eyes and picture David Sedaris’s voice in your head? It’s wry, and dry, and snarky, with a heavy dose of pathos that allows him to connect deeply with even the most mundane topics.
Now, do the same thing and picture Anne Rice. She hasn’t spent nearly as much time on stage as David Sedaris, but can’t you just picture a hauntingly beautiful love story between monstrous people played out over countless tragedies in an endless existence?
That voice you hear is their brand. It’s the first step to defining your publication. Once you have that bit, it becomes easier to define the value proposition and unique selling point of your subscription.
Your value proposition is the tangible result somebody will get from subscribing to your membership. What is the special sauce somebody gets inside your community that will excite them to join?
Your unique selling point is simply what makes your product one of a kind. The unique selling point sets you apart from every other creative on the planet. It’s something only you have. Your unique selling point might be that you print all your artwork in a certain way, or that you use certain materials. It might have to do with your worldview, the types of products you make, or the subject matter of your artwork. The unique selling point is something nobody else has except for you.
What’s important to note here is that building your brand should not be about changing your writing to fit some predefined mold. It is about finding the language to define what you offer readers in a clear and concise manner.
A great exercise to help with this is to come up with a 7-word bio. Can you define your brand in seven words? Mine is I help authors build better businesses.
How to think about metrics
What about metrics? Should you be staring at your dashboard a hundred times a day? When are metrics good and when are they bad?
Metrics are good when they give you a baseline of what to expect in every post and can show you when you have a post that exceeds or underperforms those expectations.
Metrics are bad when you take those expectations and they hamper you from doing something you want to do with your publication.
For instance, sometimes I’ll have a post that performs way worse than others even though I’m sending them all to the same audience. When that happens, I’ll change the headline and the imagery to see if that helps. Sometimes it does, but sometimes a post will only resonate with a small segment of your audience.
Tim Ferris says that he hopes that over the course of four podcast episodes, he can please 100% of his audience, but he only cares about servicing 25% of them with any given episode.
I think that’s a really good metric to think about in your writing. Will 25% of the people in your audience adore what you’re writing? Then, it’s probably worth doing, even if you think would be better to please them all. Hyperfocusing your message to resonate deeply with a small subsection of people is how you cultivate superfans.
Making these decisions is a big part of finding your voice. If you only talk about things with mass appeal, then you’ll likely start sounding like every other publication. When you focus on finding what makes your view unique, then that is when you can start separating yourself.
Weirdly, it’s usually those niche articles that get the most paid members, which is the goal, right? (Or one of the goals, at least,) It’s probably because people have never seen an article like it before, and if they think only you can deliver for them, they will see the value of joining.
Homogeneity is the death of small subscriptions. It’s in embracing their unique voice that writers thrive and find an audience. Airbnb popularized the idea that the only way to scale is to do the unscaleable, and sometimes that includes writing posts that absolutely can’t find traction in the mass audience because they speak to very specific people who need to hear it.
Most of the metrics I’ve tracked over my career have made my business worse, not better. There are only three metrics that I care about these days.
Net subscriber growth
# of quality conversations per week
$$$ in bank account
Some of my most beloved articles have almost no engagement. Most of my best-converting emails have no engagement. Most of my best subscribers are lurkers who just read religiously and never comment. I’ve not ever talked to many of the people who gave me the most money and most of our best evangelists are talking about my work without letting me know.
Maybe you care a lot about metrics, and that’s fine, especially if you’re a Desert, but for the most part, I think metrics are stupid.
That’s not to say I don’t care at all, but the three I mentioned are the only ones that have truly moved my business forward in any real way.
No matter what, if you track more than 3-5 metrics at any one time, it will be hard to have success moving any of them in a positive direction.
Final thoughts
Subscriptions are hard. There’s no way around that. The best subscriptions have been built over the course of years, not months. The best way to think about them is that they will grow over time as the best of your business grows.
In every case I can think of, creators spent a long time investing time and money into their membership before they started seeing significant growth. The frustrating part of a membership is that you have to treat it like you have 1,000 members even when you have 10.
The only consistent thing I have heard about memberships is that the creators were building, building, and building until one day it took off to the moon once their work caught on and they never looked back.
For this reason, authors should consider a low-risk, low-stress way to keep their membership going while they build it up without it costing them a ton of resources. I highlighted three different ways to build a low-stress membership depending on your personality.
I recommend starting with one of those options as your base. Then, once your membership catches on you can invest more and more of yourself into it, but if you give too much for too little return, then you’ll likely burn out. I know it happened to me several times.
How did you like that one?
What model are you going with?
Do you even have a subscription bit in your business?
Do you have any other context to add or insights we missed?
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Additional content. I’ve only got one dedicated subscriber that comments. I enjoy our chats. So Access is a benefit that isn’t doing to well.
I increased how much I publish but maybe I should paywall more posts?