​In this “extra” episode, we delve into the world of subscription models for authors and their impact on creativity and community building!

KimBoo and Gina share their journeys into the world of subscription-based writing, highlighting its transformative power. KimBoo reflects on her earlier exposure to subscription models in fanfiction communities and how it inspired her creative vision. She emphasizes the appeal of building a community and fostering deeper connections with readers.

Gina reveals her initial skepticism about subscriptions and traditional publishing’s limitations. Still, her curiosity and desire for creative freedom led her to explore this new frontier. Together, they shed light on the diversity of subscription models and the creative possibilities they offer authors. Whether you’re a seasoned writer or just starting, this episode provides valuable insights into the evolving landscape of author-reader relationships through subscriptions.

Tune in to discover how subscriptions can redefine your creative journey and build a supportive community around your work!

RESOURCES

• Archive of Our Own
• Subscriptions for Authors FB page
• House of York on Ream
• KimBoo’s Scriptorium on Substack
• Off Brand (4th Time’s the Charm?): The story of the three times I bailed on writing. An inspirational cautionary tale…
• Become an Unstoppable Storyteller: How to Craft Compelling Serials
• Gina’s HiSTORYtelling Hub on Ream
• Gina’s Quill on Substack
• Women Writing for Change FB group

Ep. 30: The New Era of Subscriptions for Authors

Dave Hogan, Gina’s Pop
0:02
Welcome to Around the Writer’s Table, a podcast focusing on the crossroads of creativity, craft, and conscious living for writers of all ages and backgrounds. Your hosts are Gina, Melody, and KimBoo, three close friends and women of a certain age, who bring to the table their eclectic backgrounds and unique perspectives on the trials, tribulations, and the joys of writing. So pull up a chair and get comfortable here around the writer’s table.

KimBoo York
0:43
Hey, y’all, it’s KimBoo. And I am here with Gina for a special bonus episode of Around the Writer’s Table. We are going to be talking about subscriptions for authors. I know some of you who are listening have probably heard us talk about this or reference it, at least on previous podcasts. Certainly, if you’ve been reading up on our blogs, our Substack blogs, or anywhere on social media, you know that we’ve mentioned it as well. You may have heard other authors muttering about the subscription model for authors and just wondered what all that’s about. 

Gina and I have been exploring it for most of 2023. And so we thought maybe we would do an extra episode to explain what the subscription model is for authors, how it might fit into your ideas of what your author career might look like, and what our personal plans are going forward with it. 

So anyway, I’m KimBoo York, I’m a romance novelist. I also am a productivity coach. And I work with writers of all stripes to encourage them to get their words out and to get it published. So that’s me. And of course, as always, I’m here with the lovely Gina Hogan Edwards. Hello. And how are you again? What do you do?

Gina Hogan Edwards
2:03
Today, I don’t know. No.

KimBoo
2:06
That’s a normal state of things around here. Yeah.

Gina
2:08
Yeah, I’m happy to be here, as always. I’m Gina Hogan Edwards. I am a writing retreat leader, a creativity coach, obviously, a podcast host, an editor. And of course, an author, which is what this is all about. Right?

KimBoo
2:26
It is. So I wanted to, a little bit of history. I’ve known about subscription model for authors for a long time, and also kind of sort of from the fanfiction community, where it’s been the primary model in the sense of people serializing stories either on Live Journal or Archive of Our Own, which is not really subscription model in the sense of paying, but I would subscribe to authors, to fanfiction writers, to read their work as it was being published in progress. So I’ve known about it for a long time. But it wasn’t until the start of this year that I really started taking it seriously as an option for me. And that’s when I talked about it with you, Gina. And you surprised me. I’ve told this story before, but I thought it was just mentioning something I was going to explore on the side, and I described it to you and you jumped in with both feet. So maybe let’s, take us back in time a little bit to that point, and talk about what your idea of subscription was before that, what it is now, how that changed you. Just to get the conversation rolling to talk to our listeners about what does it mean to be a subscription author?

Gina
3:40
Well, you said that it subscribed…surprised you. Getting all my words overlapping here.

KimBoo
3:47
We’re still working on coffee listeners. For us, it’s still morning, because I don’t know when you’re listening to this, but we’re still drinking the coffee. So forgive us.

Gina
3:54
It may have surprised you, but it surprised me even more. I did not have any real concept for subscriptions for authors. Now, I think all of us are used to things like, you know, you subscribe to somebody’s blog, and in the current world, there’s things like Medium and Substack where you can subscribe to people’s newsletters that way. But I didn’t really have any concept for subscriptions for authors. What does this mean? And we were, in our conversation, speaking specifically about the platform called Ream, which at that point hadn’t even launched yet. 

And my only framework for how an author reaches a reader is what most of our listeners out there probably have as well, which was you write a book and you either query an agent and you hopefully rely on them to get you a publisher and that’s the traditional route, right? That never appealed to me, mainly because I’m impatient, and I didn’t want to go through that king of process that can sometimes take years. I had clients as an editor, some of my clients were querying agents, and it could take them sometimes two or three years to find the agent, and then it would be another two or three years before the publisher actually—if they were lucky enough to get a publisher—to actually get the book out on the shelf. I wasn’t willing to go through that. And of course, I’ve been like you, I’ve been writing for a very long time, and so I was around before self-publishing was even a possibility. So when that came on the scene, I toyed around with that idea in my head, too. But then again, observing my clients and the process that they were going through of trying to figure out how to get a cover design, how to get interior layout done, and then the biggie: how to market the book. Hmm, yeah, up to the self-publishing author. And so that never appealed to me either. And so I just put my head down and kept on writing, and kind of put the whole idea of publishing on the back burner. 

And so when this idea of subscriptions came to the fore, bells went off, and I can’t tell you why. I can’t explain to you why I had the reaction when I did, but it was an actual, like, in my body reaction. And then, when I have that tells me that it’s something I’ve got to explore. And so that’s what I’ve been doing since January. 

I’m a total newbie at it. You know way more about it than I do. But I’m very cool to share my perspective from being a newbie and learning the process, not only from the logistical, sort of technical aspects, but also how it applies to your writing process.

KimBoo
6:57
It’s definitely a learning curve, because it is a little bit different. I mean, there’s some things, like we still need covers, right? And we still need to market. This isn’t, a subscription model isn’t a replacement for marketing. But to me, and we’ll get a little bit more into the details about what is a subscription for an author like us? What does that look like? But one of the things that really appealed to me was that instead of just marketing to someone to get them to buy a thing, and then not hearing from them ever again, or them hearing from me ever again, and constantly going through the grind of trying to find new people to buy the book or to have other readers buy the new book, it was more about building a relationship. And that was something that really appealed to me. 

Again, I go back to the fanfiction community, as I always do. But one of the things I loved about the fanfiction community and writing fanfiction in the community was the community. There were people I knew through multiple fandoms, who followed me, and there are other writers through multiple fandoms that I have followed just because I love their writing. We would talk about our stories. We would share what we were working on. People who weren’t even fanfiction writers would follow us on different social media like Tumblr, and interact, because they were curious about what was I going to do next. And I loved that. I fed on that. And it’s a little bit of a parasocial relationship. There are pros and cons. But for the most part, it felt like being part of the community, because we’re all writers. We’re trying to put our vision into the world. And it was a fanfic vision. That was a given. But it was still that whole aspect of it. 

And I thought, what if I could translate that into readers of my original fiction, so that it’s less about me trying to bribe somebody into buying my book, and more about inviting somebody into the creative world that I am engaging with and trying to create for me and for them? Right? So that was the deal for me. And so yes, there’s still marketing. There’s still all of those things going on. But I really feel like that, for me, it’s about building up that community. And I think you’ll hear that talked about a lot by a lot of authors who are jumping on the subscription model.

Gina
9:24
Definitely. And that is certainly one of the appeals among several for me. As you know, KimBoo, I’m all about creating writing communities. I’ve got the Women Writing for Change Facebook group. I bring women together at retreats. And so being able to bring writers together. The idea of bringing readers together into this community that is centralized on something that I’m creating, this environment that I’m creating for, like you said, not only for yourself but for them as well. It’s just, that was definitely one of the big appeals for me.

KimBoo
10:07
I know our listeners can’t see this because we don’t record the videos for editing reasons, but Gina’s face is just lighting up right now. She’s just like, oh, building a community. That’s her happy place, and seeing you talk about that in relation to your own writing, as well as helping other writers. That’s just awesome.

Gina
10:26
Yeah, yeah. So that was one huge appeal for me, and that was sort of the, I guess, the initial appeal. And then as I started researching, and playing around with what the possibilities are in my world, my fictional world, something that really has jumped to the forefront for me, in terms of why I want to do subscriptions, is the vast amount of creative possibility around my writing. And so, I guess this would be a good point for us to illustrate for the listeners what a subscription looks like, so that they’ll understand the context of what I mean by the flexibility of the creativity that the writer can have. Because one subscription, like, your subscription and my subscription look very different, because of the personality of the author that is going into creating this environment where they’re inviting readers in. Right? The subscription model—I’m going to pass this off to you to talk about and I’ll interject—to talk about what some of the structures are of what a subscription can look like from the author perspective.

KimBoo
11:51
So I would start that kind of explanation with just a simple basic factor, and you said this earlier, we’re already familiar with subscription in the sense of signing up for a newsletter, signing up for an email newsletter. That’s a subscription, right? That is just the basic format of a subscription. Other versions of it are Netflix and Hulu. And in our society, subscription models have been out there for a while. Patreon really broke ground. Patreon was started by a musician couple, actually—a lot of people don’t know that—who were not happy with the other platforms, because they wanted to be able to have a direct relationship with the people who wanted to support them. So they built the platform for themselves, so that people who liked their music could subscribe and support them, and then they realized there were other artists who wanted the same thing. And so they got backing, and it became Patreon, is what happened in the long run. 

But Patreon was never built for writers. And we could get into the nitty gritty on that, because there are a lot of writers who do use Patreon. But if you’ve ever supported an artist on Patreon, or somebody that you like who’s doing crafting works, and giving away instructions on how to knit. I mean, there’s so many patrons out there these days. The model for writers needed an extra step because it’s not just giving away the story or giving the story to our subscribers. We needed a way for our readers to be able to engage with the material that we were posting in a way that’s familiar and comfortable for readers. And Patreon doesn’t really do that. There’s no way to have a chapter story on Patreon, where people can go to the table of contents and then read through it. So as much as I looked at Patreon in the past, I just knew it wasn’t for us. 

So when you talk about subscribing to an author, or to a writer, it’s kind of like the next step up from a newsletter subscription. What you’re doing, whatever the platform is, whether it’s Ream or Substack, or Medium, or Patreon, is you are providing your financial support directly to the author. It’s not going through a third party. So from the self-publishing angle, for instance, there’s Vella and there’s Amazon Kindle Unlimited, which are kind of subscription models for readers. But the money doesn’t go directly to the author. It goes to Amazon, and then Amazon doles out whatever it feels it can get away, at however little money it feels like it can get away with, to the authors who are… 

Gina
A little sliver.

KimBoo
A little sliver of change. Please, sir, can I have some more? So you’re supporting the platform. You’re not supporting the writers, honestly. You’re supporting the writers indirectly, but first, you’re supporting the platform. Platforms like Patreon and Ream and Substack flipped that. 

So, on the back end, what that looks like is that those platforms get a portion of our take, but our take is our take. So if they take 10% from what we make, it’s still our money. It’s kind of like paying taxes to drive on the highway, right? Like you’re paying for the freedom to post on that platform, but the money is still coming to you directly. So it’s your readers. We’re interacting with them directly. There’s not a third party getting in our way. As authors, on all of those platforms, we have access to the emails of our subscribers, right, which we don’t on things like Vella or Radish, which are other serialized platforms, or Kindle Unlimited. Again, third-party platform. We’re paying the middleman for that access. 

So when we sign up for one of these platforms, we’re saying, “This is my space. I will have people come to read my work and pay me directly for whatever benefits we’re giving them for that price,” which we’ll go into a little bit because that can look very differently, depending on the writer.

Gina
16:10
That plays into what I was alluding to before about the creative flexibility.

KimBoo
16:14
Exactly, exactly. And Gina and I know Chris Hopper through the Subscriptions for Authors Facebook page, who just has his own little media empire, which is very different from my little tiny, media empire on Ream and Substack. So yeah, there’s a lot of ways to do it. But as far as just how it’s set up, that’s the difference between what a subscription model looks like for an author where readers are paying you directly, as opposed to paying a third party such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Radish, or even Wattpad these days, so that they can get paid out from that platform. 

I think we were talking a little bit earlier, Gina. I think it’s a good time to segue into this about how subscriptions for authors can have a lot of different looks to it. But it can also fit into a bigger picture. So it’s just another version of going wide in my opinion or going direct. Like you have a direct store, you could have direct subscriptions for authors.

Gina
17:19
Yeah, we talked about earlier, before we got on the air, about how subscriptions, you know, that could be the thing for an author, that could be their sole way of engaging with readers if they want it to be but it doesn’t have to be. It can be a piece of a puzzle. You can have a subscription and put your stories out there and still self publish or still approach a traditional publisher and/or agent. So it can be just one element of your writing career. Or you can put your entire focus into building your subscription. 

So there’s a lot of different ways that it can look for different writers, and you kind of have to figure out the way that you want to approach it. As far as the creative flexibility, that was really something that going into this, I didn’t recognize upfront. So, I jumped in with both feet, like KimBoo said, and one of the aspects of being on the Ream platform is that you’re not just doing one thing. And to illustrate what I mean by that, it’s like, if you publish on Substack, you’re publishing a newsletter. And that’s kind of the basis of it. So you’re offering this newsletter that people can subscribe to. Some writers offer their newsletters for free; some charge for it; some have an optional pay, but that’s what you’re doing. You’re writing a newsletter, and you’re offering that. On Ream, you have what are called tiers, and these are different levels at which you can offer different benefits to authors. And so I, jumping in with both feet like I do, I created four different tiers. 

KimBoo
19:17
Oh, I remember that.

Gina
19:18
You could support me for $5 a month, $10 a month, $15 month, $20 a month. So you had options if you were a reader and came to my page at that point, and I was promising the world. And one of the things that Ream creators—who happen to be fiction authors also, which I think is important for us to note—one of the things that they really espouse is to underpromise and overdeliver. And so between about March when I first started conceptualizing my Ream page and what my tiers and my subscription would look like, and today, I revised my tiers four times, y’all.

KimBoo
20:10
And I was there for all of it, so I can confirm that that is what she did.

Gina
20:16
And that sounds like I was all over the place. And in a way I was, but what I was doing each time was I was whittling away at my ideas and what I wanted to deliver to the reader in a way that would be manageable within my schedule, and also in a creative way that was fulfilling for me. And so I needed that time to sort of play with what I wanted my sort of theme, if you will, of my page to be and what my initial offering to the reader was going to be. It’s no longer promising the world, but it’s promising the beginning of this new environment that I’m creating that over time is going to get more and more robust. And so that opportunity to kind of play around creatively with what I want to do with my writing, it really made me think deeply about what does a writing career mean to me? What does engaging with the reader mean to me? And what aspects of the creative process do I want to share with them?

KimBoo
21:31
And I think it’s important to, it’s kind of like the backlighting on that is that the advantage here is having that freedom to imagine what that’s going to look like. As you said when we started this episode, previously, there was one track. There was you write the book, you get an agent, you get a publishing contract. And there were some you know, you could do vanity press, if you didn’t care about any of that. You could get published in literary journals. And there was a little bit of flexibility, but there wasn’t—right, some variations on the theme, but it was that theme. That was what the publishing model was back then. And at this point, through all the changes of the self-publishing revolution and the internet and all the things that are going on, we now have the freedom to make that decision. What is my author career going to look like? What is it going to incorporate? Is it going to be a subscription newsletter on Substack and a traditional publishing contract? Or is it going to be multiple tiers on Ream and something on Substack? Like, there’s just so many variations in that. 

One of the things I want to get back to though is, you talked about, the word that I wrote down while you were talking because I wanted remember it was ‘robust.’ And what I, for me as I was watching you explore this, was your creativity became robust. All these ideas that you had kind of sat on. Listeners may or may not have heard her talking about the World’s Fair series, which I won’t reveal too much about that. That’s kind of a code word for a project Gina may or may not be working on. I’m not saying anything. But you know, these ideas that had been simmering and just but in a way oppressed because of the publishing model, just didn’t think you would be able to do those things, or get to them or be able to work on them. And suddenly it just all started bubbling up and things started happening, and you had all these, like we call them signs from the universe, whatever they are, synchronicity, because you were exploring the subscription model.

Gina
23:44
Thank you for reminding me of that, because it truly, it was mind blowing, y’all. I mean, as soon as I started thinking about the possibilities and playing around with different ideas for what I wanted to share, all of a sudden things that I had in the file cabinet in the back of the office in the furthest corner in the dark started coming to the surface again. Hmm. It was so exciting. It is so exciting.

KimBoo
24:14
It’s so exciting. Like every week, you’d come in with some new synchronicity coincidence thing about something that was relating to an idea that you had. It was just wild. It really was, y’all. It was amazing to watch that. And I’ve experienced a little bit of that in the sense of looking at ideas that I thought nobody would buy, that I would never be able to put out there in the world in a way that would be sustainable in the old model even as self publishing. But what I realized with a subscription model for me is I don’t need to find 20,000 people to buy a single book. What I need are to find that 1,000 people in a world of 8 billion people, 8 billion people, right? B, with the B, billion people. The 1,000 or so people who want to read what I want to write and who love the same things I do and want to be a part of that world. And that may take a while for me to find those people. But I know they’re out there. Having the subscription model in place means I have the time to build that up and to find them, rather than constantly pushing the wall against marketing the next book. Yeah, and trying to find the next niche. So it was an exciting time. This year has been an exciting time for both of us, as we’ve gotten into the subscription model.

Gina
25:38
I think the thing, and I can only speak for myself, but having witnessed you going through this process at the same time, I think that one of the big appeals for both of us that has been super satisfying, is the idea of truly leaning in to who we want to be as writers as opposed to—and I’ll use the term—writing to market.

KimBoo
26:10
Mm hmm. Hallelujah, and amen. Because that is absolutely the truth. It has been a sense of freedom for me creatively to do that.

Gina
26:19
You’ve talked about, and you even wrote an essay about how you had restarted your career, your writing career, three different times.

KimBoo
26:28
You’re right, we will include a link to that in the show notes, but I did. I did post that on my Substack recently about, you know, I wrote books, I published books. So why didn’t my career already exist at that point? And it was because I could not deal with the write-to-market stress. I could not conform to that model, not happily. There are people who can and are comfortable doing that. I don’t mean any shade to anybody. But I could not do that. It really took me down about three times. Yeah.

Gina
26:59
And you don’t have to deal with that anymore.

KimBoo
27:03
I don’t. And I love it, which is great. And we’ll be talking about this in a future bonus episode where we’re gonna go into a little bit more detail about writing serials. I just published a book about that. Not going to derail it here, but my current serial that I’m working on, Transmigrated Teri, kind of a portal isekai fantasy, I kind of sat on that idea for almost two years. I know I talked about it a while ago, and just was like, “Well, nobody’s gonna want this middle-aged woman, this bitter office lady woman’s story, of her dropping into a fantasy world.” But I don’t have to worry about that. Yeah, wrong. People I talk to about it are really excited about it. And if I can just find a few readers, just find enough readers who are interested in that story. I don’t need to have 50,000 volumes in sales to make that a success. I can just write the story I want to write.

Gina
27:59
Yeah, you and I write very different things, and we’re at very different stages in our author careers. So I’ve got a lot of nonfiction out there, but I have no fiction published, whereas you have multiple books that have been out there. I write southern fiction, coming-of-age, more historical bent. And I want to let the listeners here know that subscriptions for authors, this is a new concept, and to date, it has been more embraced by certain genres, primarily—and you can correct me if you have a different perspective, KimBoo—but primarily by those genres that have also had some appeal in the fanfiction arena.

KimBoo
Right. Yeah.

Gina
So I’m not only coming at this from a newbie author in terms of not having published fiction, but I’m also entering into this from a genre that doesn’t have a track record of success in subscriptions for authors. But, honestly, not a lot of genres have a long track record because this is a new concept. This is a new model for writers. Some authors have been doing it longer than others and embraced it earlier than others, but it’s still quite a new concept. And I’m willing to kind of dive into this and sort of see what happens, but I think both of us embraced this because we see it as the future of publishing, the future for authors. This is where the publishing market is going in terms of authors and readers having a direct connection.

KimBoo
29:58
And I think it’s important to note that I don’t think the traditional models are going to go away, ever. We still have hard copy books, despite the success of digital books. But I think this is going to be such an important step for authors in going into the future. I totally agree with you. Well, you know, I agree with you. But I think it’s really, really going to affect how a lot of authors’ careers go from here. It’s just the start. 

I know historical fiction, which is your primary, your meta genre for your work, doesn’t have that. But especially if you’re on Substack. We’re seeing it a little bit more on Ream. We’re getting more standard science fiction and standard thriller and different genres over on Ream, outside of the big romance genre that’s super popular, I think more because of Wattpad, honestly, than specifically fanfiction. But that’s a history somebody’s going to do a dissertation on it at some point. 

But over on Substack, you are seeing a lot more genres. You’re seeing a lot more literary fiction. You’re seeing a lot more fairy tales. You’re seeing a lot more horror, psychological horror, rather than… and historical, and historical fiction. So that’s really, it’s blossoming. I agree with you. I think this is the future. Definitely.

Gina
31:19
Yeah, I’m looking forward to our next bonus podcast already, when we talk about the difference between serializing a novel and a serial, because they are different.

KimBoo
31:31
They are different. And I’ve written a whole book about it.

Gina
I had to learn that.

KimBoo
Well, I’ve had to figure it out. What is the difference? Oh, my God, it was like being back in undergraduate school when I was working on my undergraduate thesis, and my advisor was always like, “Define your terms. Define your terms. Define your terms.” I’m like, “Shut up. I don’t want to find anything anymore.” So it’s been an adventure. 

So we’re gonna wrap this one up, this bonus episode. Again, we’re going to do another bonus episode down the road on serials. We don’t have a date when these episodes will go up specifically, because we’re still moving forward with our planned episodes with Melody, who I hope we get back soon. Because this was recorded while she was still busy, busy with her move. But hopefully we’ll get her back soon. Yeah, I guess that’s it. Anything to add?

Gina
32:27
No, like you said, we’ll continue talking about The Creativity Quest and some other topics that we’ve got going on. But from time to time, whenever we are inspired by a topic, you’ll get these bonus episodes. Thanks.

KimBoo
32:42
Yeah. So thanks. Thank you for joining us. Yeah. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. 

Gina
Bye.

Dave
32:51
Thanks for joining us around the writer’s table. Please feel free to suggest a topic or a guest by emailing info@aroundthewriterstable.com. Music provided with gracious permission by Langtry. A link to their music is on our homepage at AroundTheWritersTable.com. Everyone here around the writer’s table wishes you joy in your writing and everyday grace in your living. Take care, until next time.

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