Direct Selling Strategies for Authors

Alright, so intro to direct selling for authors. That is a lot of stuff. We're gonna go through a lot today. We're gonna cover my favorite two things, crowdfunding and subscriptions. I am Russell Nolte. I'm a USA Today best-selling author. I run a publishing company called Wannabe Press where I make really weird portal fantasy books and comics. Even though I mostly write novels, I'm mostly known as a nonfiction teacher and such. So like I release about 10 books a year. One of them is nonfiction, the other not. But how I built all of this methodology is from fiction. So let's just get started. What is direct sales? So direct sales is someone buying directly from you. That means there is no intermediary between you and the reader. Intermediary we'll talk about but basically Amazon is an intermediary. A platform is an intermediary. Somebody, like I give that book to this person here and they give it and they sell it to you, that's an intermediary. But there is a range of direct sales and it is a lot. It's just, it's a lot. I'm not gonna lie to you guys. It's just, direct sales is a lot. There's a lot of ins, outs and what have yous. But basically some people will pay you. but somebody else will accept the payment. So like, we'll talk about that, what that means. And others, you can literally just, you hand them, they hand you $20, like at a farmer's market, and you hand them a product. So it goes the wide range. So let's talk first, let's talk about a couple of these. So Patreon. So Patreon takes and handles the payment. That means somebody is, when somebody is subscribed to your Patreon, which is a subscription platform, They are handling all of the payment and then distributing that money to you. But you own the data, the chain of custody of the customer. So there's really two parts of this. It's do you own the chain of custody and do you handle the payment? And Patreon, you have the chain of custody. It's mostly your customer support. You're handling the sales tax. Sorry, but they handle the sales tax. They handle the payment. They handle distribution of that payment part. The big reason why it's important to talk about the payment is because if you ever decide you don't like Patreon, they own all the customer data. You can't take it anywhere. I see this all the time with people who want to move to Reem or Substack. They have to keep this Patreon going because they would lose literally every piece of payment data for these customers. Substack, on the other hand, you handle the chain of custody. of the data and you handle the payment. What does that mean? Stripe connects to Stripe, Substack connects to Stripe, Stripe is owned by you, your Stripe account, you have access to all the data, so you can literally be like, Stripe, I don't want to be on Substack anymore, can you point all these to Beehive? And Substack will be like, well it's going to take a lot of effort from you, but like yes I can do that because you are in control of the customer data. And all the way through to the payment. That also means you don't only have to handle customer support but also sales tax and all of that other stuff. If you ever decide you hate Substack, you can leave the platform and also keep the customer data and the payment data. Does that make sense? Alright, now let's talk about Kindle Vela. So Kindle is an intermediary. They handle the payment, they handle the customer support, they handle the sales tech, they handle the payment data. You can leave off-platform and you get nothing. They're the intermediary, it's their customer, you're just playing with them. So it's a very wide range of what direct sales can do, but they generally are broken down into a couple of things. Do you control the data? And then do you control the customer payment gateway? Why is this important? It's because... We've all heard of people that just get their Kindle accounts cancelled and they have to start from scratch yet again. We've all heard stories of Kindle changing... Man, I'm really ragging on Amazon right now. That's okay, I don't think anyone's going to mind in this room. Amazon changes the algorithm and suddenly you're not getting payments. Or Redis changes the payment structure and suddenly you're like, well, I built this platform when you were at one payment structure and I really want to leave but I literally can't because I just built... I built everything on another platform. This happened on Facebook. It's really not fun when they take your platform away from you that you helped build. But direct sales is basically more money. They generally pay you more from fewer customers. It allows you to sell different products than just books, bundle different books, and then build a relationship with your customer that stands the test of time. I have people on my list from my first campaign. Kickstarter campaign that's still by for me today. It's wonderful. So what if you're in Kindle Unlimited? Kindle Unlimited, different than Kindle Vela. If you're in Kindle Unlimited, Kindle is for ebooks only. Now you can be exclusive to Amazon with audiobooks, but that is a whole different thing than Kindle Unlimited. So even if you're using it for ebooks, you can still use it to do New books that aren't in Kindle Unlimited, print, audio, merch, bundles, all sorts of things that aren't e-books. You can create ancillary stories. You can expand beyond books. You can do games. You can do literally anything that's not e-books. So if you're like, well, I can't do direct sales because I'm in KU, there's a whole, whole lot of options for you available. So we, my business partner and I, track five. different types of direct sales. One is web stores. The one that you'll probably know is Shopify. Sales pages and special offers like Click from ClickFunnels, Optimized Press, other products. You're basically like, buy my whole series for $20. And it's a sales page. It's one page. It's not a Shopify store. Then there's conventions and book signings. These are most analogous to farmer's markets. It's the most direct you can get. You're literally handing them the book and they're giving you money. And then subscriptions and crowdfunding, which is where we're going to focus today. Why are we going to focus there? Because I consider this direct sales light. You do not have to set up a platform. You don't have to optimize it. They already optimize it for you. For most people, they are overwhelmed. I don't think that's a surprise to anyone. Like the number one thing I hear is I'm overwhelmed by all the options in direct sales. And one of the things that we try to... to factor out is everything that's not messaging. Because if your messaging is wrong, then no amount of anything else is going to work. But your messaging could be killer, and you just stink at tech. Or you might just not be able to get something coded right. And usually, if you stay with these subscription platforms, they have optimized it. Kickstarter's only job is to be a highly optimized sales page. That's it. If something changes in the world, Their job is to just, if they aren't optimized, there's no reason to do it. Same thing with Patreon, same thing with Substack, all of these things, like their only job is to like make the tech right so you don't have to worry about it. Once you get the messaging right, it becomes a lot easier to say, get your Kickstarter and make it a landing page and make it a thing on your web store and all of the other things. But you want to isolate as many variables as possible, which is why I think one of these two options is the best. And usually both of them in concert. Direct Sales Lite means they control all of the things, but you control, or mostly control, the data, the relationship, the list building, and the ability to expand to other places. So most of the people on a Kickstarter will decide to join my mailing list when I ask them in a survey. Most of the people that, like all the people that subscribe to my sub stack. that are on my newsletter as well. So like I have control of the data even though it's being built on another platform as opposed to a platform like Medium where like they say you have a mailing list and I guess you are building something but like it's really hard to export all that stuff. So like when I say direct sales I mean you must at least control the chain of custody of the data. So let's talk about crowdfunding first. People ask me for a definition and I'm like crowdfunding it's like crowdfunding. But the best thing I can say is it is time-based direct sales. You're trying to raise funds to launch a product. Kickstarter, for instance, is a platform where everything is optimized and there's a whole ecosystem. One of the things I didn't talk about earlier, which I probably should, is you can go from one Kickstarter to the next, to the next, to the next. They have recommendation engines. They have all of this stuff that helps grow your campaign that you don't get when you're just doing a direct sales store yourself. So Kickstarter alone has raised $317 million for publishing products. You probably all know Brandon Sanderson made over 41 million dollars on Kickstarter alone. Students in the Kickstarter Accelerator have raised over a million dollars in the last two years. None of them are named Brandon Sanderson. So people are like, well, Brandon Sanderson can do it. I've raised $500,000 on Kickstarter and I can promise like no one in this, likely no one in this room even knows that I write 40 Portal Fantasy books, except that I just told you. So you can really do this with like one book. If you've got one book, if you've got... well, not if you've got zero books. If you've got one product, you can launch a Kickstarter campaign and be successful. Not $41 million successful, but probably $500 to $1,500 successful. So the advantages of crowdfunding, you make more money from fewer backers. The average pledge on Kickstarter is $25 as opposed to like a dollar or so if someone has a Kindle Unlimited read. You start building a mailing list of buyers. This is really important so I'm gonna stop in it for one second. So many of you have mailing lists and have no idea who the buyers on your mailing list are and it freaks me out. Like you guys are running you guys run surveys to people and make decisions about the future of your business from people that you do not know if we're buying your book you just know that they're real loud and usually in my experience the loudest people spend the least money. Like the people that buy them, that have been with me the longest, I think I have talked to maybe three times. Some of them three times, maybe one time ever in ten years. And so if you have a list of buyers, you can be like, oh, not to say that one person's opinion is more important than the other, but like it's like for your business career, it's certain, like it's true that like if you're trying to make a business decision and someone's never read your books or maybe even actively dislikes your books, like they're probably not the best person to decide what the future of your career should be. So like if you have a list of buyers you can be like, oh Mary's spent $500 with me in the last two years. Maybe I should like take her opinion a little more serious than the person who's been on my list for three years and done nothing but negative comments. Test out products, elongate a launch with multiple peaks. Like there's just so many reasons to have advantage for crowdfunding. And also usually it's going to be like two or three weeks. So if you're like, I don't really know if I want to be in direct sales. It's like, well, do you want to test it for a month? Because you could literally set up this campaign, I would not say to run it in December, but in January, you could just be like, I'm going to spend January building up a campaign, then launching it, and if it stinks, I'm only going to have it live for two weeks, and then I can say, I don't like that. Or like, I like that, but I've made a bunch of bad decisions, and I'm going to change those decisions next time. As opposed to setting up a web store, which is like... It can become your life. Even if you're very good at it, it can become your life. And most people should not get started with just a web store because it's your whole life. So let's case study a couple of really good three options for a book that you could run in January. I only say January, not December, because you don't want to be competing with JCPenney for people's money. They're going to win every time. Well, they're not going to win every time, but they're going to win more times than you. So, number one, anniversary book. This is a book that has been out for a couple of years. Even one year is enough, even six months is enough, and you want to celebrate that anniversary by giving a special edition hardcover, or special formatting, or a special something, or just you've created a different part of your universe for that book, and you want to do audio books, or audio commentary, whatever it is. you basically already have a book that sells, that is not in KU probably, or has outlived its best earning years. Let's say that. All books are valuable and beautiful, but some of them just don't do as much work as others. And it might be time to be like, hey, maybe this one can work again. I knew it sold three years ago. Let's try and give it a new life, give it a glow up, give it a cover change, and maybe I can breathe new life into this series. But it's a book that you already know is successful, so when you go to test it. You already have data. It's like, oh, I know this is successful, so it should work. If it doesn't work, probably there's something wrong with my messaging. Another one, a second chance book. So this is my favorite way to use Kickstarter, because I use Kickstarter for weird books. Like, that's what I look for in books. And second chance books are books that, like... are much loved but have not been much loved by enough people. And so like they're the books that like usually are not are off trope or just a little bit weirder than the other ones. Like you can't get traction with them but like you know that when someone reads it they love it. Usually the second chance books are the ones that your fans love the most but sell the least. I don't know why that is but like breaks my heart every time. But you could this is not a second chance book and this is just one of our one of our students. But You know that the story works. You know the hooks work. You know your audience likes it. So there's no reason why it wouldn't work on Kickstarter. I'm saying all of these because what really matters is you're using this first campaign to test data. A lot of people have taken the words that I say and said that you need to run a $10,000 campaign with sprayed edges and hardcovers and books out of China. I've never said any of those things. I don't run those kind of campaigns. They freak me out looking at them. Like, I run campaigns that basically have e-books, paperback books, maybe audio books if I've done them, and like a pin or something. They are very, very, very, very small and contained. I'm just trying to raise money to repay, like, the production costs on them, and they usually do better than that. But, like, my last campaign, Friday, last Friday, came into my warehouse at 1 in the afternoon, and by 5 they were out the door. And, like, that's what I want. A campaign that I can set up in a day, a campaign that I can deliver in a day, and a campaign that gives me no headaches. And those big campaigns, they're great, but they're nothing but headaches. They're asking for a headache. And also asking you to invest a lot of money to maybe get it back. I'd rather you invest no money and maybe get it back. That's a lot better scenario for me. The third is brand expansion. This is probably going to resonate with people who've... Got a couple of books out or aquatics if you know our author ecosystem but like we put out a game earlier this year I'm working on an RPG I'm just like trying to expand out of the thing the the book box and like Kickstarter is great for that because you can test your product messaging and get money to like recover costs for these these brand expansion things. I do not recommend some sense this as your first campaign recommend this is something when you have an audience. Most importantly, something where your audience has bugged you about something that you don't want to do is a really good way to do a Kickstarter. You're like, oh, you want me to do a game? Well, here's a campaign. Make me 10 grand and I will do the game. And maybe it'll work, maybe it doesn't. But it doesn't matter because if it doesn't work, you also win. Because you don't have to do the thing. And then you can just be like, if you wanted this thing, you should have. bought it. I don't know what to tell you. Capitalism is not great, but also it's the world we live in. So where can you crowdfund? Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Crowdfunder, Zoop, Spaceman Project. Don't use it. GoFundMe. God, please do not use GoFundMe. GoFundMe is great, but it's like your book will be next to someone trying to get a kidney donation. And it's not like the vibe of conducive to fiction. It's like having a good cool experience like it's kind of a bummer just literally the reason that GoFundMe exists So do it on Kickstarter or something like that So in almost every scenario you should use Kickstarter. Why? Well, especially if you're sci-fi fantasy or horror like this already You like a ton of people doing Kickstarter. So you're gonna have more people to like promote with Also our books called Kickstarter Get your book selling on Kickstarter. So like people just Default the Kickstarter because as crowdfunding already not saying you shouldn't use Indiegogo I am saying you should not use GoFundMe if you have comics. Zoop is okay crowd funder is okay But like you probably are going to use Kickstarter But you can also go wide with crowdfunding for instance start on Kickstarter and then do something like a go GoFundMe in demand campaign or a crowd funder which can last for longer and then like let's say it's going to take three months to deliver your campaign, you could do your campaign and then be like, oh, for people that missed the campaign, you can have GoGo going, Crowdfunder going, and then like close them all once you're going to deliver all of your rewards. Like, so you don't have to necessarily choose. I won't say why choose because that's not a reverse harem, but like also why choose? You can do all of it. There are a lot of disadvantages to crowdfunding. For instance, you are responsible for delivering everything. Also launching is hard. I hear it all day every day, launching a Kickstarter is hard. And I empathize and sympathize, but also yes it's hard and you chose this life, the life didn't choose you. It's public so you can go back on KickTrack or even on Kickstarter and research every campaign. Have you ever spent time being like, wow, this book really is doing well on Kindle now. I really wish I knew how it did three minutes ago. Some people have gotten a lot better at guessing. Kickstarter has public data all the way back to the beginning of their campaign. They have people that's tracked it. When people ask me what to do for rewards, I say go look at the people who've been successful and see what they're doing. and you can literally go and see who the most successful people are. It's kind of a sad popularity contest, but also, like, data is data. It's not good or bad. It's just data. All right, subscriptions. So subscriptions are somebody paying you a monthly fee for access to some sort of backstage. I guess it can be a yearly fee, too. It could be, like, a quarterly fee. Somebody is paying you some amount of money to access something. backstage with something, something, something semantics. Usually it's less money per month, but delivered over a longer period of time. The thing with subscriptions are they're hard. I know, they're hard, they're hard, they're hard. I will listen to you say they're hard, but they're hard and they're hardest at the beginning. They're easier once you have a bunch of people in them. They're hard, they're very hard. It's probably going to take you years to build a subscription that works, which is why you should be working on it while you're working on other stuff, developing your direct sales. I've tried 10 platforms, I even built my own app, and it only is in the last like six months as things started to catch. So, the advantage of subscriptions, it's predictable money every month, you can test out products with your dedicated fans, build deeper relationships with readers, monetize stuff in the process earlier, so like rough drafts or like serials or all sorts of things, like you get to monetize, you get to monetize the things that will eventually be afterburn of your... That's a nice way of saying you get to monetize your garbage, but like it's not a nice way to say it, but like all the things are like, oh look you see the first draft and I'm like I want to burn this, but like you want to pay for it like I'll let you. My friend said a long time so much it wants to wants to pay for your pay you you should let them probably. How to make money with subscriptions. So here are three models for subscriptions. One is early release. I was talking with a nice human being earlier about fantasy. And a great release strategy for fantasy is to put your stuff on Royal Road or Wattpad. They have integrations to Patreon and use it as like, for $1, get one episode ahead. For $5, get five episodes ahead. For $10, get 10 episodes ahead. The best part about this is I have a 12-book series called The God's Verse Chronicles. If you go to my author stack, sub stack, you get a free, you can read all of it, and you get a new chapter every week. It's done. It's like I've written it. It's done. I'm just now monetizing it. It's great. I just put a chapter every week or five times a week or however many times, and suddenly you are re-monetizing a thing. Direct sales is hard. Direct sales is great because you can keep monetizing the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over in different ways. And some people will pay for all of them, and they are wonderful. They're all wonderful, but you can release things pre-edited. Additional content. So I am not an additional content person, but some people really like bonus scenes, epilogues, all sorts of extra things. And this is another model that's great. You can do extra things. You can do extra things for your fans, and it's great. The question that I ask, oh, did I not do this one? Okay, so the bottom of the early release is, what would you pay for your favorite author's first draft? Not like your best friend's first draft, but like, I always think, yeah, like, if... if Alex Harrow like told me to pay $50 and I get the first draft of 10,000 doors of January like I'd pay it I'll pay it like I'd read it and then I'd study literally the how it works ever so like you have to imagine for subscriptions that you are someone's favorite author I know that is kind of vain but like publishing is vanity like we're all asking people to take words that we decide in our head and not only like read them but buy them consume them love them cherish them and like put a piece in their heart like That's pretty vain, so we should just get over that. The question for the additional content is, what would you pay for extra stories set in your favorite series? Melissa Albert put out like an additional story on Patreon for like her Hazelwood series or additional fairy tales like I would pay for it I don't know like the same question is like you have to you have to make the space in yourself that you were someone's favorite author because it's true or access the third is access now I wouldn't pay for access because I my ideal is you write a thing and then I scurry and and like enjoy it how I want to without you ever bothering me again. But like some people really love access and want access to you. And if that works for you, then access is great because you don't have to make anything new. You just have to make yourself available to people like once a month or once a week. Or that could be chats. It can be live streams. It can be extra events. It can be all sorts of things. Like they're basically paying for access. You currently are paying for access to this. This membership of 20 books. Okay, you'll likely do all of these. You should choose one. It's okay to choose and then be like, that stinks or I hated it. As I mentioned, I've tried every single subscription platform and until Substack, except for Ream because it came out after I... It started to accept beta after I'd already set up my Substack and it started working. But every other platform that's ever existed that I could run a membership on, I tried it. They all stunk, but I kept doing it. I kept doing it until I found one that really worked. It's okay if they don't work. You only need one crowdfunding platform to work. You only need one subscription to work. You don't have to have a bunch of them. You can just try them until one works and then that's it. Disadvantages. Oh my god, they're so hard. Subscriptions are so hard. Look, Monica and I launched a book two days ago. It's made $8,000. I make $6,000 a year. on my sub stack after doing nothing but posting like hundreds of thousands of words on it. It's so hard to start a subscription. I get it. I also empathize with all of that. That is why I recommend doing things like a PBS style membership drive where you focus on it really hard for like two weeks and then like you can just hopefully get mass adoption by like 100 people and it's a lot easier when you have 100 or like a few even 20. It's a lot harder because you If you have one member, you have to deliver all of the things. But if you have 10,000 members, you have to still deliver the same things, generally. You have to deliver every month, forever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever. Again, it's usually very little money until it's a lot of money. And I can't tell you when that inflection point will be. It might be three months. It might be ten months. If you've ever listened to Katie Roberts talk about her Patreon, she had it for like two, three years before it started to really, like, take off. And then it took off. That's the thing about the about it's like delusion delusion delusion delusion delusion and then like hockey stick growth and so it's tough. Subscriptions, Patreon, Reem, Substack. I released a post on Substack this morning on my authorstack.substack.com about the two different kinds of models, why you should use them and when. I recommend you read that. Maybe there was a reason why I did that today when I was doing this presentation, so I could get you to go over there and read it. It's very good, but it's very long. What platform is best? I don't know. You've just got to test a bunch of them. Patreon has the market share. I don't think it really matters. The really only thing that Patreon has is integrations into things like Wattpad and Royal Road that will help you get organic reach. Market share doesn't matter because they really don't let you have discoverability. Substack has the network effect but they only allow you to have one tier. So it's great because it has organic reach. The thing I hate about subscriptions is it's like I don't want to have to bring all my people to the party. I want them to go buy my books. I want you to bring people to the party for me and like I will deliver them a great experience and Substack's better for that. Ream is specific to authors, has a very pretty e-reader, like it's got all this stuff, it's new. Like I love the people who made it so I trust in them but like a lot of authorship has not been historically great at new things. So without a bunch of people who can say yes in my exact genre I've done it and here is why. I don't think it's bad to go wide with subscriptions. Monica talks, my business partner Monica Leonel talks about this all the time. Maybe you want to have a sub stack and you also want to have a patreon and you also want to have a ream. I don't know like you once by the time you're making the thing for the one platform it's just like copy and pasting then. Like it's not that much harder than going wide. So it's possible to go wide with subscriptions. I think that's a nightmare. I just want to do one thing. But going wide might not be a bad thing, especially if you can use Zappy or something else. You want to go where the people are already comfortable buying. It's a lot easier to get people to buy when they already have given their payment information to someone. How do you make money with subscriptions? We talked about launch events. I'm a tundra, if you know my author ecosystem. So I'm all about live launch, live launch, live launch. Like the other four ones are like, I can't do that. I will say our business last year suffered tremendously by doing the live launch model only because Monica's business model is based on evergreen and people coming when they want the thing and then coming into our ecosystem when it works for them and so if you are that kind of person then like you probably still want to be the reason I like the PBS style membership drive is because like you can subscribe to PBS whenever any day you want to subscribe to PBS you can do it but like you only get a tote if you do it in like a certain time of year Drive back matter, you can do things like Wattpad to Patreon or something like that. It's going to be slow growth. As I mentioned, slow growth until it's like hockey stick growth. And there's like a little bit of in-between, but like what I usually see it's like once it hits, it super hits and until it hits it really doesn't hit. Like it's very slow. Like for instance in the last 30 days my Patreon has grown by My sub stack has grown by $140 a year despite the fact that I've put 50,000 words in that sub stack. But other months it's grown like two or three thousand a year and so I don't know it's hard it's hard. I can't say it enough times. I know people look at well the question is the thing most people say is like how do I make it less hard and so when you do that I'm gonna be like it's just hard man you chose this life the life didn't choose you. Why not both? I do Kickstarters multiple times a year. I have a sub stack. I have different ways for people to enter my ecosystem. It's very tough to do all of these at once. I recommend picking one thing a quarter and trying it and then if that works, continue working it. And if not, try something else. The first quarter of this year I tried Circle. I hated it. I tried sub stack. Quarter two, assuming that it was going to not work, and I was going to try quarter three, and I was like, what, Substack really worked, really, really, really worked. And so I was like, I'm just going to keep doing that then. And that became my growth for the third quarter and the fourth quarter now because I'm continuing to try and grow it. So once something catches, you can keep doubling down on it, but you probably don't want to do what most people do when they go wide, which is pick their worst series. Put it out there and like not run ads to it and just assume it's magically going to work and then a month later be like it didn't work I'm going back to KU. That's not a good way strategy for direct sales. I'm not a retailer expert but I think I can say with a lot of confidence it's also not a great thing on retailers to do it that way but try one thing a quarter. That is why I was talking about do Kickstarter Q1 in January because like it's a new year. Even though time is ephemeral, we all like to start new things in January. So Kickstarter has a thing called Make 100 in January, which is you make 100 of one product, at least one product on your thing, and it's like you do a short campaign, it's very low energy, and you test if you like it. You might not like it. If you're a Tundra, you'll love it. If you're another ecosystem, you'll have different feelings about it. How this works is an integrated system. So my friend Amelia Rose, who's a co-founder of Reem, has a Patreon. She releases books on Wattpad, Radish. She is wide with her subscriptions. She just did a Kickstarter for a comic. She's on Webtoon. She's like all over the place. But like her home base is where her community lies because that's where she makes most of her money. Katie Roberts, we talked about. Very successful releasing books, but like smashed through it in Kickstarter. And that led to her Patreon growth. She said this. many times before, so I'm not saying anything out of school, is when her Kickstarter went really well, suddenly her Patreon also did well at the same time. So you're able to funnel both things together. Monica, my business partner, is a very successful non-fiction author. We release books together. She has a sub stack. She has a ream. We have courses. We have all the things kind of like working together. And like $6,000 here, $30,000 here, $10,000 here, like leads up to a lot of money. I'm not a tax accountant, so I'm just gonna go find somebody who knows about taxes. I have opinions on this, but I'm definitely not going to share them anywhere that's recorded. And then we have a book called Direct Sales Mastery for Authors. It's the definitive guide. It's 800 pages. That's why it's so long, because it's the definitive guide. If you want to know how this all integrates together, writermba.com forward slash DSA will take you there. I highly recommend it. We spent... entire year just digging down on this concept and it's great I wrote 40,000 new words for it it's a lot it's a lot it's a lot direct sales is a lot it's so much it's a lot it's so much yeah Yes, I highly recommend you go to theauthorstack.com. That's where I have a bunch of posts about free posts you can read. You don't even have to subscribe, although it would be cool if you did, even for free, including my post today. I am now here for questions for 10 minutes and 9, 8, 7. I'm going to not stop saying that, but someone come up and ask questions because I know you got them because I went real, real, real fast. So regarding Kickstarter specifically, do you have any spectacular fails or near fails? and what did you learn from them? Oh, I just did a campaign for this hospice, Shared World, which was me and five other authors. And I won't say it's a fail, but I'll say that I made $17 in profit after spending a year building it. And so I would say... Make sure you have buy-in from all the six people in your shared world, and maybe don't launch them all in a month, like release them over a longer period of time. I would say the biggest fails that I've had this year aren't really fails, it's just like I work I've worked with a lot of collaborators, and I've seen a lot of other people, and I've worked with a lot of people, and it's like vibing with them is just like you've got to have the vibes right. Like it's like a mindset thing that people talk about. When I heard at the beginning of my career, I wanted to punch people in the neck. but like it's true like just make sure the vibes are right and most importantly like I have spent so much money going hard on a campaign and then I at the end of the day I was like wait I raised $25,000 like how do I only make raised $2,000 how do I only make two grand on this after spending like a quarter of my life living this world and like then I would then I started doing more fiction stuff the way that I teach it and I was like well I made five grand and like only took me like three weeks like this is great so like revenue is great it like makes it look really good like other people look way better than me when it comes to like the campaigns that they run because they're racing like 20 30 a billion dollars and then you're like oh but like you only made $2,000 in profit it's like I worked for three days and like I made $3,000 in profit so like profit is more important than revenue and make sure you like can deal sanity first like always optimize for enjoyment on anything. This may be a longer question, but how does advertising a Kickstarter campaign work? Don't. So that was flippant. The metrics that I would say are unless you have a $60 average play... value in at least a hundred organic backers in the first couple of days. Don't even consider advertising because probably not it's even if so we did a campaign earlier this year on backer kit and it was Cthulhu it was a camp a thing that really, really had a lot of traction. I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars on this book. We thought it was going to do really, really well. Backerkit started ads. Two days later, they're like, it's not going to be profitable. So we're going to stop that. So even if you have a campaign with a lot of traction, even if it hits all of the boxes, you probably will at best get a 1.8 to 2.2 ROI, which is not bad. But it's a lot of money you're spending for not a lot of return. I would be much more likely. to tell, I would tell you more to go and do more like list building, either it's like written word media or book sweeps or your own like cross promotions and like build your own mailing list and then take a long enough time before your campaign to really drip the stuff out to get people excited. That's going to do way more for you than, and doing backer swaps throughout the campaign, like all of that stuff is going, is like more. man hours but if there was a way to do ads effectively for projects I would have found it by now and it's just I've tested every way it feels like it's completely It's completely arbitrary what ones work, but if you want to run ads, brand building ones are okay if you're gonna come back a lot of times. Like one of our people, Jennifer Hilt, she's running ones for Trope Thesaurus and she's like, that's her brand? So she's like, I'm doing brand building ones, but like she builds that brand anyway so it makes sense for her to keep doing those things. And if you're gonna use the ecosystem and keep building your own Like, your Kickstarter habit, it might be okay to do it that way, but like, in general, actual advertising is, I don't know if you know this, advertising is hard. The margins are bad. Like, it's hard to do it even when you're good at it. And so, because it's a print-first medium and the profits are the worst on print books, like, it just becomes hard. I would also say make sure you have at least a 50% profit margin on each tier. and add a lot of digital stuff that you can deliver for free if you're going to try ads. So even if you're not getting a great profit margin, even if you're not getting a great ROI on your ad spend, you're still not losing even more money by printing books, and you're not even falling harder in the home. Just two quick questions. Can you upload AI-generated audiobooks on these platforms, or is that a no-no? And for crowdfunding, are there any genres that it really doesn't work well for? Contemporary. genres well on kickstarter it's just it's very hard i don't know why orianna and i monica like we've spent years trying to get contemporary romance authors to work well on kickstarter and it's just they underperformed the most. I still have had amazing success with contemporary romance authors. It's just like paranormal just does better. Paranormal suspense if you're a thriller author, paranormal romance if you're a romance author, sci-fi, fantasy, and horror if you're a genre author, those ones tend to do better than contemporary. I would love to not just not say those words. I'd love to just be like, everyone can do it, but like it does seem like a lot of people can't. I've been convinced I've been punched in the mouth enough for saying that it can work for anyone that I will caveat that by saying The people that underperformed the most on the platform compared to their audience size tend to be contemporary romance authors A contemporary thriller authors? I guess anything contemporary or I guess I should say not necessarily contemporary, anything that does not have monsters in it and anything that is not paranormal does worse than that exact same thing. But that's that said that is on Kickstarter which was the thing with like and that is not just monsters It's like sci-fi things like anything doesn't have a genre element is gonna do worse than ones that do not that said that is for Crowdfunding if you look at someone like Elena Johnson, she does cowboy romance, doesn't get much more contemporary than Elena Johnson, doesn't get much more like, and she's killing it on Reem. And so like that, and I'll bet if she had a Kickstarter, she would. would use all of the fundamental stuff that we've taught her over the years and get people excited about it. The other thing about contemporary romance people is, I'm not saying it's easy for anyone, but the people that KU was easiest for are contemporary romance authors. When they leave that thing and they have to do mailing list things and build a campaign and do all sorts of other stuff, and then keep it... They can't just slam through a bunch of ads the first two days and have the algorithm work for them. The method for success in the contemporary romance KU thing is antithetical to the... way that like sci-fi fantasy and horror authors have always had to make which is like it's very hard it's hard for us to make money because there's less of us to like there's less fans so like we're like at conventions and all of this stuff and my contemporary romance has been like why do you do things why is it so like why do you do all this hard things like why don't you just it's like because the East like this is less you've got to go to them more so I don't know if like that is part of it there's nothing against contemporary romance authors It's just in general, there's like their high KU. KU is all about like ads and like stacking ads quickly and like then having the algorithm catch and help you. And there's no algorithm on Kickstarter to help you really. Like there's like a little algorithm, but like that catch doesn't happen. So people tend to go, and this is actually overall, people tend to go into new platforms thinking the things that worked on the old platforms will work for the new platform. And so in the same way, I suck at retailers. I'm terrible at retailers because it goes against everything I've ever learned or ever done. Having someone else help me and an algorithm work for me is antithetical to everything that's worked for me my entire life. So even though Monica is like a platform expert, literally the words that she said to this day sound like gibberish to me. So I would say that the best thing you can do is just make sure that you're... going into a platform, learning how it worked, and then don't say the thing that most authors say is like, but my way is going to work for me. Maybe it will, but let's try the best practice way first. And if that doesn't work, or if you say, wow, I learned that the best practice way is great, but these three things are stupid. I'm going to go and do it the other way. Then at least you know what the best practice way of launching a ream or a Patreon or something is. like taking it into your own hands. or find me on AuthorStack, or take our quiz, or find me on The Thing.

I'm a USA Today best-selling author. I run a publishing company called Wannabe Press where I make really weird portal fantasy books and comics. Even though I mostly write novels, I'm mostly known as a nonfiction teacher and such. So like I release about 10 books a year.

One of them is nonfiction, the other not. But how I built all of this methodology is from fiction. So let's just get started.

What is direct sales? So direct sales is someone buying directly from you. That means there is no intermediary between you and the reader. Intermediary we'll talk about but basically Amazon is an intermediary.

A platform is an intermediary. Somebody, like I give that book to this person here and they give it and they sell it to you, that's an intermediary. But there is a range of direct sales and it is a lot.

It's just, it's a lot. I'm not gonna lie to you guys. It's just, direct sales is a lot. There's a lot of ins, outs and what have yous. But basically some people will pay you.

but somebody else will accept the payment. So like, we'll talk about that, what that means. And others, you can literally just, you hand them, they hand you $20, like at a farmer's market, and you hand them a product.

So it goes the wide range. So let's talk first, let's talk about a couple of these. So Patreon.

So Patreon takes and handles the payment. That means somebody is, when somebody is subscribed to your Patreon, which is a subscription platform, They are handling all of the payment and then distributing that money to you. But you own the data, the chain of custody of the customer. So there's really two parts of this. It's do you own the chain of custody and do you handle the payment?

And Patreon, you have the chain of custody. It's mostly your customer support. You're handling the sales tax. Sorry, but they handle the sales tax.

They handle the payment. They handle distribution of that payment part. The big reason why it's important to talk about the payment is because if you ever decide you don't like Patreon, they own all the customer data. You can't take it anywhere. I see this all the time with people who want to move to Reem or Substack.

They have to keep this Patreon going because they would lose literally every piece of payment data for these customers. Substack, on the other hand, you handle the chain of custody. of the data and you handle the payment.

What does that mean? Stripe connects to Stripe, Substack connects to Stripe, Stripe is owned by you, your Stripe account, you have access to all the data, so you can literally be like, Stripe, I don't want to be on Substack anymore, can you point all these to Beehive? And Substack will be like, well it's going to take a lot of effort from you, but like yes I can do that because you are in control of the customer data. And all the way through to the payment. That also means you don't only have to handle customer support but also sales tax and all of that other stuff.

If you ever decide you hate Substack, you can leave the platform and also keep the customer data and the payment data. Does that make sense? Alright, now let's talk about Kindle Vela.

So Kindle is an intermediary. They handle the payment, they handle the customer support, they handle the sales tech, they handle the payment data. You can leave off-platform and you get nothing.

They're the intermediary, it's their customer, you're just playing with them. So it's a very wide range of what direct sales can do, but they generally are broken down into a couple of things. Do you control the data?

And then do you control the customer payment gateway? Why is this important? It's because...

We've all heard of people that just get their Kindle accounts cancelled and they have to start from scratch yet again. We've all heard stories of Kindle changing... Man, I'm really ragging on Amazon right now. That's okay, I don't think anyone's going to mind in this room.

Amazon changes the algorithm and suddenly you're not getting payments. Or Redis changes the payment structure and suddenly you're like, well, I built this platform when you were at one payment structure and I really want to leave but I literally can't because I just built... I built everything on another platform. This happened on Facebook.

It's really not fun when they take your platform away from you that you helped build. But direct sales is basically more money. They generally pay you more from fewer customers.

It allows you to sell different products than just books, bundle different books, and then build a relationship with your customer that stands the test of time. I have people on my list from my first campaign. Kickstarter campaign that's still by for me today.

It's wonderful. So what if you're in Kindle Unlimited? Kindle Unlimited, different than Kindle Vela.

If you're in Kindle Unlimited, Kindle is for ebooks only. Now you can be exclusive to Amazon with audiobooks, but that is a whole different thing than Kindle Unlimited. So even if you're using it for ebooks, you can still use it to do New books that aren't in Kindle Unlimited, print, audio, merch, bundles, all sorts of things that aren't e-books.

You can create ancillary stories. You can expand beyond books. You can do games.

You can do literally anything that's not e-books. So if you're like, well, I can't do direct sales because I'm in KU, there's a whole, whole lot of options for you available. So we, my business partner and I, track five.

different types of direct sales. One is web stores. The one that you'll probably know is Shopify.

Sales pages and special offers like Click from ClickFunnels, Optimized Press, other products. You're basically like, buy my whole series for $20. And it's a sales page. It's one page. It's not a Shopify store.

Then there's conventions and book signings. These are most analogous to farmer's markets. It's the most direct you can get.

You're literally handing them the book and they're giving you money. And then subscriptions and crowdfunding, which is where we're going to focus today. Why are we going to focus there? Because I consider this direct sales light. You do not have to set up a platform.

You don't have to optimize it. They already optimize it for you. For most people, they are overwhelmed. I don't think that's a surprise to anyone. Like the number one thing I hear is I'm overwhelmed by all the options in direct sales.

And one of the things that we try to... to factor out is everything that's not messaging. Because if your messaging is wrong, then no amount of anything else is going to work. But your messaging could be killer, and you just stink at tech.

Or you might just not be able to get something coded right. And usually, if you stay with these subscription platforms, they have optimized it. Kickstarter's only job is to be a highly optimized sales page. That's it.

If something changes in the world, Their job is to just, if they aren't optimized, there's no reason to do it. Same thing with Patreon, same thing with Substack, all of these things, like their only job is to like make the tech right so you don't have to worry about it. Once you get the messaging right, it becomes a lot easier to say, get your Kickstarter and make it a landing page and make it a thing on your web store and all of the other things. But you want to isolate as many variables as possible, which is why I think one of these two options is the best. And usually both of them in concert.

Direct Sales Lite means they control all of the things, but you control, or mostly control, the data, the relationship, the list building, and the ability to expand to other places. So most of the people on a Kickstarter will decide to join my mailing list when I ask them in a survey. Most of the people that, like all the people that subscribe to my sub stack.

that are on my newsletter as well. So like I have control of the data even though it's being built on another platform as opposed to a platform like Medium where like they say you have a mailing list and I guess you are building something but like it's really hard to export all that stuff. So like when I say direct sales I mean you must at least control the chain of custody of the data. So let's talk about crowdfunding first.

People ask me for a definition and I'm like crowdfunding it's like crowdfunding. But the best thing I can say is it is time-based direct sales. You're trying to raise funds to launch a product.

Kickstarter, for instance, is a platform where everything is optimized and there's a whole ecosystem. One of the things I didn't talk about earlier, which I probably should, is you can go from one Kickstarter to the next, to the next, to the next. They have recommendation engines.

They have all of this stuff that helps grow your campaign that you don't get when you're just doing a direct sales store yourself. So Kickstarter alone has raised $317 million for publishing products. You probably all know Brandon Sanderson made over 41 million dollars on Kickstarter alone.

Students in the Kickstarter Accelerator have raised over a million dollars in the last two years. None of them are named Brandon Sanderson. So people are like, well, Brandon Sanderson can do it.

I've raised $500,000 on Kickstarter and I can promise like no one in this, likely no one in this room even knows that I write 40 Portal Fantasy books, except that I just told you. So you can really do this with like one book. If you've got one book, if you've got...

well, not if you've got zero books. If you've got one product, you can launch a Kickstarter campaign and be successful. Not $41 million successful, but probably $500 to $1,500 successful. So the advantages of crowdfunding, you make more money from fewer backers.

The average pledge on Kickstarter is $25 as opposed to like a dollar or so if someone has a Kindle Unlimited read. You start building a mailing list of buyers. This is really important so I'm gonna stop in it for one second.

So many of you have mailing lists and have no idea who the buyers on your mailing list are and it freaks me out. Like you guys are running you guys run surveys to people and make decisions about the future of your business from people that you do not know if we're buying your book you just know that they're real loud and usually in my experience the loudest people spend the least money. Like the people that buy them, that have been with me the longest, I think I have talked to maybe three times. Some of them three times, maybe one time ever in ten years. And so if you have a list of buyers, you can be like, oh, not to say that one person's opinion is more important than the other, but like it's like for your business career, it's certain, like it's true that like if you're trying to make a business decision and someone's never read your books or maybe even actively dislikes your books, like they're probably not the best person to decide what the future of your career should be.

So like if you have a list of buyers you can be like, oh Mary's spent $500 with me in the last two years. Maybe I should like take her opinion a little more serious than the person who's been on my list for three years and done nothing but negative comments. Test out products, elongate a launch with multiple peaks.

Like there's just so many reasons to have advantage for crowdfunding. And also usually it's going to be like two or three weeks. So if you're like, I don't really know if I want to be in direct sales. It's like, well, do you want to test it for a month?

Because you could literally set up this campaign, I would not say to run it in December, but in January, you could just be like, I'm going to spend January building up a campaign, then launching it, and if it stinks, I'm only going to have it live for two weeks, and then I can say, I don't like that. Or like, I like that, but I've made a bunch of bad decisions, and I'm going to change those decisions next time. As opposed to setting up a web store, which is like... It can become your life.

Even if you're very good at it, it can become your life. And most people should not get started with just a web store because it's your whole life. So let's case study a couple of really good three options for a book that you could run in January. I only say January, not December, because you don't want to be competing with JCPenney for people's money. They're going to win every time.

Well, they're not going to win every time, but they're going to win more times than you. So, number one, anniversary book. This is a book that has been out for a couple of years. Even one year is enough, even six months is enough, and you want to celebrate that anniversary by giving a special edition hardcover, or special formatting, or a special something, or just you've created a different part of your universe for that book, and you want to do audio books, or audio commentary, whatever it is. you basically already have a book that sells, that is not in KU probably, or has outlived its best earning years. Let's say that.

All books are valuable and beautiful, but some of them just don't do as much work as others. And it might be time to be like, hey, maybe this one can work again. I knew it sold three years ago.

Let's try and give it a new life, give it a glow up, give it a cover change, and maybe I can breathe new life into this series. But it's a book that you already know is successful, so when you go to test it. You already have data. It's like, oh, I know this is successful, so it should work.

If it doesn't work, probably there's something wrong with my messaging. Another one, a second chance book. So this is my favorite way to use Kickstarter, because I use Kickstarter for weird books. Like, that's what I look for in books. And second chance books are books that, like...

are much loved but have not been much loved by enough people. And so like they're the books that like usually are not are off trope or just a little bit weirder than the other ones. Like you can't get traction with them but like you know that when someone reads it they love it. Usually the second chance books are the ones that your fans love the most but sell the least.

I don't know why that is but like breaks my heart every time. But you could this is not a second chance book and this is just one of our one of our students. But You know that the story works. You know the hooks work.

You know your audience likes it. So there's no reason why it wouldn't work on Kickstarter. I'm saying all of these because what really matters is you're using this first campaign to test data. A lot of people have taken the words that I say and said that you need to run a $10,000 campaign with sprayed edges and hardcovers and books out of China. I've never said any of those things.

I don't run those kind of campaigns. They freak me out looking at them. Like, I run campaigns that basically have e-books, paperback books, maybe audio books if I've done them, and like a pin or something. They are very, very, very, very small and contained.

I'm just trying to raise money to repay, like, the production costs on them, and they usually do better than that. But, like, my last campaign, Friday, last Friday, came into my warehouse at 1 in the afternoon, and by 5 they were out the door. And, like, that's what I want. A campaign that I can set up in a day, a campaign that I can deliver in a day, and a campaign that gives me no headaches.

And those big campaigns, they're great, but they're nothing but headaches. They're asking for a headache. And also asking you to invest a lot of money to maybe get it back. I'd rather you invest no money and maybe get it back. That's a lot better scenario for me.

The third is brand expansion. This is probably going to resonate with people who've... Got a couple of books out or aquatics if you know our author ecosystem but like we put out a game earlier this year I'm working on an RPG I'm just like trying to expand out of the thing the the book box and like Kickstarter is great for that because you can test your product messaging and get money to like recover costs for these these brand expansion things.

I do not recommend some sense this as your first campaign recommend this is something when you have an audience. Most importantly, something where your audience has bugged you about something that you don't want to do is a really good way to do a Kickstarter. You're like, oh, you want me to do a game?

Well, here's a campaign. Make me 10 grand and I will do the game. And maybe it'll work, maybe it doesn't. But it doesn't matter because if it doesn't work, you also win.

Because you don't have to do the thing. And then you can just be like, if you wanted this thing, you should have. bought it. I don't know what to tell you.

Capitalism is not great, but also it's the world we live in. So where can you crowdfund? Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Crowdfunder, Zoop, Spaceman Project. Don't use it. GoFundMe.

God, please do not use GoFundMe. GoFundMe is great, but it's like your book will be next to someone trying to get a kidney donation. And it's not like the vibe of conducive to fiction.

It's like having a good cool experience like it's kind of a bummer just literally the reason that GoFundMe exists So do it on Kickstarter or something like that So in almost every scenario you should use Kickstarter. Why? Well, especially if you're sci-fi fantasy or horror like this already You like a ton of people doing Kickstarter. So you're gonna have more people to like promote with Also our books called Kickstarter Get your book selling on Kickstarter.

So like people just Default the Kickstarter because as crowdfunding already not saying you shouldn't use Indiegogo I am saying you should not use GoFundMe if you have comics. Zoop is okay crowd funder is okay But like you probably are going to use Kickstarter But you can also go wide with crowdfunding for instance start on Kickstarter and then do something like a go GoFundMe in demand campaign or a crowd funder which can last for longer and then like let's say it's going to take three months to deliver your campaign, you could do your campaign and then be like, oh, for people that missed the campaign, you can have GoGo going, Crowdfunder going, and then like close them all once you're going to deliver all of your rewards. Like, so you don't have to necessarily choose. I won't say why choose because that's not a reverse harem, but like also why choose?

You can do all of it. There are a lot of disadvantages to crowdfunding. For instance, you are responsible for delivering everything.

Also launching is hard. I hear it all day every day, launching a Kickstarter is hard. And I empathize and sympathize, but also yes it's hard and you chose this life, the life didn't choose you. It's public so you can go back on KickTrack or even on Kickstarter and research every campaign.

Have you ever spent time being like, wow, this book really is doing well on Kindle now. I really wish I knew how it did three minutes ago. Some people have gotten a lot better at guessing. Kickstarter has public data all the way back to the beginning of their campaign. They have people that's tracked it.

When people ask me what to do for rewards, I say go look at the people who've been successful and see what they're doing. and you can literally go and see who the most successful people are. It's kind of a sad popularity contest, but also, like, data is data.

It's not good or bad. It's just data. All right, subscriptions. So subscriptions are somebody paying you a monthly fee for access to some sort of backstage.

I guess it can be a yearly fee, too. It could be, like, a quarterly fee. Somebody is paying you some amount of money to access something. backstage with something, something, something semantics. Usually it's less money per month, but delivered over a longer period of time.

The thing with subscriptions are they're hard. I know, they're hard, they're hard, they're hard. I will listen to you say they're hard, but they're hard and they're hardest at the beginning. They're easier once you have a bunch of people in them. They're hard, they're very hard.

It's probably going to take you years to build a subscription that works, which is why you should be working on it while you're working on other stuff, developing your direct sales. I've tried 10 platforms, I even built my own app, and it only is in the last like six months as things started to catch. So, the advantage of subscriptions, it's predictable money every month, you can test out products with your dedicated fans, build deeper relationships with readers, monetize stuff in the process earlier, so like rough drafts or like serials or all sorts of things, like you get to monetize, you get to monetize the things that will eventually be afterburn of your... That's a nice way of saying you get to monetize your garbage, but like it's not a nice way to say it, but like all the things are like, oh look you see the first draft and I'm like I want to burn this, but like you want to pay for it like I'll let you.

My friend said a long time so much it wants to wants to pay for your pay you you should let them probably. How to make money with subscriptions. So here are three models for subscriptions. One is early release.

I was talking with a nice human being earlier about fantasy. And a great release strategy for fantasy is to put your stuff on Royal Road or Wattpad. They have integrations to Patreon and use it as like, for $1, get one episode ahead.

For $5, get five episodes ahead. For $10, get 10 episodes ahead. The best part about this is I have a 12-book series called The God's Verse Chronicles.

If you go to my author stack, sub stack, you get a free, you can read all of it, and you get a new chapter every week. It's done. It's like I've written it.

It's done. I'm just now monetizing it. It's great. I just put a chapter every week or five times a week or however many times, and suddenly you are re-monetizing a thing. Direct sales is hard.

Direct sales is great because you can keep monetizing the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over in different ways. And some people will pay for all of them, and they are wonderful. They're all wonderful, but you can release things pre-edited.

Additional content. So I am not an additional content person, but some people really like bonus scenes, epilogues, all sorts of extra things. And this is another model that's great. You can do extra things. You can do extra things for your fans, and it's great.

The question that I ask, oh, did I not do this one? Okay, so the bottom of the early release is, what would you pay for your favorite author's first draft? Not like your best friend's first draft, but like, I always think, yeah, like, if... if Alex Harrow like told me to pay $50 and I get the first draft of 10,000 doors of January like I'd pay it I'll pay it like I'd read it and then I'd study literally the how it works ever so like you have to imagine for subscriptions that you are someone's favorite author I know that is kind of vain but like publishing is vanity like we're all asking people to take words that we decide in our head and not only like read them but buy them consume them love them cherish them and like put a piece in their heart like That's pretty vain, so we should just get over that. The question for the additional content is, what would you pay for extra stories set in your favorite series?

Melissa Albert put out like an additional story on Patreon for like her Hazelwood series or additional fairy tales like I would pay for it I don't know like the same question is like you have to you have to make the space in yourself that you were someone's favorite author because it's true or access the third is access now I wouldn't pay for access because I my ideal is you write a thing and then I scurry and and like enjoy it how I want to without you ever bothering me again. But like some people really love access and want access to you. And if that works for you, then access is great because you don't have to make anything new.

You just have to make yourself available to people like once a month or once a week. Or that could be chats. It can be live streams.

It can be extra events. It can be all sorts of things. Like they're basically paying for access.

You currently are paying for access to this. This membership of 20 books. Okay, you'll likely do all of these. You should choose one. It's okay to choose and then be like, that stinks or I hated it.

As I mentioned, I've tried every single subscription platform and until Substack, except for Ream because it came out after I... It started to accept beta after I'd already set up my Substack and it started working. But every other platform that's ever existed that I could run a membership on, I tried it.

They all stunk, but I kept doing it. I kept doing it until I found one that really worked. It's okay if they don't work.

You only need one crowdfunding platform to work. You only need one subscription to work. You don't have to have a bunch of them. You can just try them until one works and then that's it.

Disadvantages. Oh my god, they're so hard. Subscriptions are so hard. Look, Monica and I launched a book two days ago.

It's made $8,000. I make $6,000 a year. on my sub stack after doing nothing but posting like hundreds of thousands of words on it.

It's so hard to start a subscription. I get it. I also empathize with all of that.

That is why I recommend doing things like a PBS style membership drive where you focus on it really hard for like two weeks and then like you can just hopefully get mass adoption by like 100 people and it's a lot easier when you have 100 or like a few even 20. It's a lot harder because you If you have one member, you have to deliver all of the things. But if you have 10,000 members, you have to still deliver the same things, generally. You have to deliver every month, forever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever. Again, it's usually very little money until it's a lot of money. And I can't tell you when that inflection point will be.

It might be three months. It might be ten months. If you've ever listened to Katie Roberts talk about her Patreon, she had it for like two, three years before it started to really, like, take off. And then it took off.

That's the thing about the about it's like delusion delusion delusion delusion delusion and then like hockey stick growth and so it's tough. Subscriptions, Patreon, Reem, Substack. I released a post on Substack this morning on my authorstack.substack.com about the two different kinds of models, why you should use them and when.

I recommend you read that. Maybe there was a reason why I did that today when I was doing this presentation, so I could get you to go over there and read it. It's very good, but it's very long.

What platform is best? I don't know. You've just got to test a bunch of them. Patreon has the market share.

I don't think it really matters. The really only thing that Patreon has is integrations into things like Wattpad and Royal Road that will help you get organic reach. Market share doesn't matter because they really don't let you have discoverability. Substack has the network effect but they only allow you to have one tier.

So it's great because it has organic reach. The thing I hate about subscriptions is it's like I don't want to have to bring all my people to the party. I want them to go buy my books.

I want you to bring people to the party for me and like I will deliver them a great experience and Substack's better for that. Ream is specific to authors, has a very pretty e-reader, like it's got all this stuff, it's new. Like I love the people who made it so I trust in them but like a lot of authorship has not been historically great at new things. So without a bunch of people who can say yes in my exact genre I've done it and here is why. I don't think it's bad to go wide with subscriptions.

Monica talks, my business partner Monica Leonel talks about this all the time. Maybe you want to have a sub stack and you also want to have a patreon and you also want to have a ream. I don't know like you once by the time you're making the thing for the one platform it's just like copy and pasting then. Like it's not that much harder than going wide.

So it's possible to go wide with subscriptions. I think that's a nightmare. I just want to do one thing. But going wide might not be a bad thing, especially if you can use Zappy or something else.

You want to go where the people are already comfortable buying. It's a lot easier to get people to buy when they already have given their payment information to someone. How do you make money with subscriptions? We talked about launch events. I'm a tundra, if you know my author ecosystem.

So I'm all about live launch, live launch, live launch. Like the other four ones are like, I can't do that. I will say our business last year suffered tremendously by doing the live launch model only because Monica's business model is based on evergreen and people coming when they want the thing and then coming into our ecosystem when it works for them and so if you are that kind of person then like you probably still want to be the reason I like the PBS style membership drive is because like you can subscribe to PBS whenever any day you want to subscribe to PBS you can do it but like you only get a tote if you do it in like a certain time of year Drive back matter, you can do things like Wattpad to Patreon or something like that.

It's going to be slow growth. As I mentioned, slow growth until it's like hockey stick growth. And there's like a little bit of in-between, but like what I usually see it's like once it hits, it super hits and until it hits it really doesn't hit. Like it's very slow. Like for instance in the last 30 days my Patreon has grown by My sub stack has grown by $140 a year despite the fact that I've put 50,000 words in that sub stack.

But other months it's grown like two or three thousand a year and so I don't know it's hard it's hard. I can't say it enough times. I know people look at well the question is the thing most people say is like how do I make it less hard and so when you do that I'm gonna be like it's just hard man you chose this life the life didn't choose you. Why not both? I do Kickstarters multiple times a year.

I have a sub stack. I have different ways for people to enter my ecosystem. It's very tough to do all of these at once. I recommend picking one thing a quarter and trying it and then if that works, continue working it.

And if not, try something else. The first quarter of this year I tried Circle. I hated it. I tried sub stack. Quarter two, assuming that it was going to not work, and I was going to try quarter three, and I was like, what, Substack really worked, really, really, really worked.

And so I was like, I'm just going to keep doing that then. And that became my growth for the third quarter and the fourth quarter now because I'm continuing to try and grow it. So once something catches, you can keep doubling down on it, but you probably don't want to do what most people do when they go wide, which is pick their worst series.

Put it out there and like not run ads to it and just assume it's magically going to work and then a month later be like it didn't work I'm going back to KU. That's not a good way strategy for direct sales. I'm not a retailer expert but I think I can say with a lot of confidence it's also not a great thing on retailers to do it that way but try one thing a quarter. That is why I was talking about do Kickstarter Q1 in January because like it's a new year. Even though time is ephemeral, we all like to start new things in January.

So Kickstarter has a thing called Make 100 in January, which is you make 100 of one product, at least one product on your thing, and it's like you do a short campaign, it's very low energy, and you test if you like it. You might not like it. If you're a Tundra, you'll love it. If you're another ecosystem, you'll have different feelings about it.

How this works is an integrated system. So my friend Amelia Rose, who's a co-founder of Reem, has a Patreon. She releases books on Wattpad, Radish.

She is wide with her subscriptions. She just did a Kickstarter for a comic. She's on Webtoon. She's like all over the place.

But like her home base is where her community lies because that's where she makes most of her money. Katie Roberts, we talked about. Very successful releasing books, but like smashed through it in Kickstarter.

And that led to her Patreon growth. She said this. many times before, so I'm not saying anything out of school, is when her Kickstarter went really well, suddenly her Patreon also did well at the same time.

So you're able to funnel both things together. Monica, my business partner, is a very successful non-fiction author. We release books together.

She has a sub stack. She has a ream. We have courses. We have all the things kind of like working together.

And like $6,000 here, $30,000 here, $10,000 here, like leads up to a lot of money. I'm not a tax accountant, so I'm just gonna go find somebody who knows about taxes. I have opinions on this, but I'm definitely not going to share them anywhere that's recorded. And then we have a book called Direct Sales Mastery for Authors. It's the definitive guide.

It's 800 pages. That's why it's so long, because it's the definitive guide. If you want to know how this all integrates together, writermba.com forward slash DSA will take you there.

I highly recommend it. We spent... entire year just digging down on this concept and it's great I wrote 40,000 new words for it it's a lot it's a lot it's a lot direct sales is a lot it's so much it's a lot it's so much yeah Yes, I highly recommend you go to theauthorstack.com.

That's where I have a bunch of posts about free posts you can read. You don't even have to subscribe, although it would be cool if you did, even for free, including my post today. I am now here for questions for 10 minutes and 9, 8, 7. I'm going to not stop saying that, but someone come up and ask questions because I know you got them because I went real, real, real fast.

So regarding Kickstarter specifically, do you have any spectacular fails or near fails? and what did you learn from them? Oh, I just did a campaign for this hospice, Shared World, which was me and five other authors.

And I won't say it's a fail, but I'll say that I made $17 in profit after spending a year building it. And so I would say... Make sure you have buy-in from all the six people in your shared world, and maybe don't launch them all in a month, like release them over a longer period of time.

I would say the biggest fails that I've had this year aren't really fails, it's just like I work I've worked with a lot of collaborators, and I've seen a lot of other people, and I've worked with a lot of people, and it's like vibing with them is just like you've got to have the vibes right. Like it's like a mindset thing that people talk about. When I heard at the beginning of my career, I wanted to punch people in the neck.

but like it's true like just make sure the vibes are right and most importantly like I have spent so much money going hard on a campaign and then I at the end of the day I was like wait I raised $25,000 like how do I only make raised $2,000 how do I only make two grand on this after spending like a quarter of my life living this world and like then I would then I started doing more fiction stuff the way that I teach it and I was like well I made five grand and like only took me like three weeks like this is great so like revenue is great it like makes it look really good like other people look way better than me when it comes to like the campaigns that they run because they're racing like 20 30 a billion dollars and then you're like oh but like you only made $2,000 in profit it's like I worked for three days and like I made $3,000 in profit so like profit is more important than revenue and make sure you like can deal sanity first like always optimize for enjoyment on anything. This may be a longer question, but how does advertising a Kickstarter campaign work? Don't.

So that was flippant. The metrics that I would say are unless you have a $60 average play... value in at least a hundred organic backers in the first couple of days. Don't even consider advertising because probably not it's even if so we did a campaign earlier this year on backer kit and it was Cthulhu it was a camp a thing that really, really had a lot of traction.

I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars on this book. We thought it was going to do really, really well. Backerkit started ads. Two days later, they're like, it's not going to be profitable. So we're going to stop that.

So even if you have a campaign with a lot of traction, even if it hits all of the boxes, you probably will at best get a 1.8 to 2.2 ROI, which is not bad. But it's a lot of money you're spending for not a lot of return. I would be much more likely. to tell, I would tell you more to go and do more like list building, either it's like written word media or book sweeps or your own like cross promotions and like build your own mailing list and then take a long enough time before your campaign to really drip the stuff out to get people excited.

That's going to do way more for you than, and doing backer swaps throughout the campaign, like all of that stuff is going, is like more. man hours but if there was a way to do ads effectively for projects I would have found it by now and it's just I've tested every way it feels like it's completely It's completely arbitrary what ones work, but if you want to run ads, brand building ones are okay if you're gonna come back a lot of times. Like one of our people, Jennifer Hilt, she's running ones for Trope Thesaurus and she's like, that's her brand?

So she's like, I'm doing brand building ones, but like she builds that brand anyway so it makes sense for her to keep doing those things. And if you're gonna use the ecosystem and keep building your own Like, your Kickstarter habit, it might be okay to do it that way, but like, in general, actual advertising is, I don't know if you know this, advertising is hard. The margins are bad. Like, it's hard to do it even when you're good at it.

And so, because it's a print-first medium and the profits are the worst on print books, like, it just becomes hard. I would also say make sure you have at least a 50% profit margin on each tier. and add a lot of digital stuff that you can deliver for free if you're going to try ads.

So even if you're not getting a great profit margin, even if you're not getting a great ROI on your ad spend, you're still not losing even more money by printing books, and you're not even falling harder in the home. Just two quick questions. Can you upload AI-generated audiobooks on these platforms, or is that a no-no?

And for crowdfunding, are there any genres that it really doesn't work well for? Contemporary. genres well on kickstarter it's just it's very hard i don't know why orianna and i monica like we've spent years trying to get contemporary romance authors to work well on kickstarter and it's just they underperformed the most. I still have had amazing success with contemporary romance authors. It's just like paranormal just does better.

Paranormal suspense if you're a thriller author, paranormal romance if you're a romance author, sci-fi, fantasy, and horror if you're a genre author, those ones tend to do better than contemporary. I would love to not just not say those words. I'd love to just be like, everyone can do it, but like it does seem like a lot of people can't.

I've been convinced I've been punched in the mouth enough for saying that it can work for anyone that I will caveat that by saying The people that underperformed the most on the platform compared to their audience size tend to be contemporary romance authors A contemporary thriller authors? I guess anything contemporary or I guess I should say not necessarily contemporary, anything that does not have monsters in it and anything that is not paranormal does worse than that exact same thing. But that's that said that is on Kickstarter which was the thing with like and that is not just monsters It's like sci-fi things like anything doesn't have a genre element is gonna do worse than ones that do not that said that is for Crowdfunding if you look at someone like Elena Johnson, she does cowboy romance, doesn't get much more contemporary than Elena Johnson, doesn't get much more like, and she's killing it on Reem.

And so like that, and I'll bet if she had a Kickstarter, she would. would use all of the fundamental stuff that we've taught her over the years and get people excited about it. The other thing about contemporary romance people is, I'm not saying it's easy for anyone, but the people that KU was easiest for are contemporary romance authors.

When they leave that thing and they have to do mailing list things and build a campaign and do all sorts of other stuff, and then keep it... They can't just slam through a bunch of ads the first two days and have the algorithm work for them. The method for success in the contemporary romance KU thing is antithetical to the... way that like sci-fi fantasy and horror authors have always had to make which is like it's very hard it's hard for us to make money because there's less of us to like there's less fans so like we're like at conventions and all of this stuff and my contemporary romance has been like why do you do things why is it so like why do you do all this hard things like why don't you just it's like because the East like this is less you've got to go to them more so I don't know if like that is part of it there's nothing against contemporary romance authors It's just in general, there's like their high KU.

KU is all about like ads and like stacking ads quickly and like then having the algorithm catch and help you. And there's no algorithm on Kickstarter to help you really. Like there's like a little algorithm, but like that catch doesn't happen.

So people tend to go, and this is actually overall, people tend to go into new platforms thinking the things that worked on the old platforms will work for the new platform. And so in the same way, I suck at retailers. I'm terrible at retailers because it goes against everything I've ever learned or ever done. Having someone else help me and an algorithm work for me is antithetical to everything that's worked for me my entire life. So even though Monica is like a platform expert, literally the words that she said to this day sound like gibberish to me.

So I would say that the best thing you can do is just make sure that you're... going into a platform, learning how it worked, and then don't say the thing that most authors say is like, but my way is going to work for me. Maybe it will, but let's try the best practice way first.

And if that doesn't work, or if you say, wow, I learned that the best practice way is great, but these three things are stupid. I'm going to go and do it the other way. Then at least you know what the best practice way of launching a ream or a Patreon or something is. like taking it into your own hands.

or find me on AuthorStack, or take our quiz, or find me on The Thing.

Transcript for:Direct Selling Strategies for Authors

Transcript for:
Direct Selling Strategies for Authors