An Author's Vision for Substack
Where I see potential.
This issue is available for everyone, without a paywall.
It’s time to lay out the vision.
Much has changed last last two months and much will change as we move forward, but this is the path I’m envisioning for my own author site. As I learn, I share the journey here for you to use what you like and adapt what can be suited for your own personal vision.
I have some personal parameters for forging this path. First, I want to spend as little money as possible. The areas that have cost me money are:
I own my own domain
I have an email connected to that domain
I spent the $50 to connect my domain to my author site
Be warned. Go Daddy has difficulty working with both Substack and Laterpress. What should be a simple matter becomes days of uncertainty and stress. I don’t have domain provider recommendations, but I don’t recommend Go Daddy.
I have the $100 / year account with Bookfunnel so I can participate in their promotions. Story Origin does something similar, but I haven’t used them because they’re a little more expensive.
As a note on costs savings, the $100 Bookfunnel account allows you to have two pen names. I’ve unofficially partnered with
, whose vision is similar to my own. I host her books in my second pen-name slot, and she’s made my recent, non-fiction book covers, etc. You can look for similar opportunities to share costs. Also, I highly recommend you follow all of her accounts as I’ll be talking about her efforts as examples in coming articles.The second parameter is related to the first, because the normal launch process requires buying ads. Well beyond the need for investing cash, however, I’ve proven myself unwilling to follow the usual book-launch fundamentals. I’ve researched them, and I’ve begun to share some here. This is how people achieve successful book launches, and I’m not telling you not to do the normal stuff. I just don’t have it in me. If you can do those things you’ll probably be more successful than not, and the Substack path can be considered an addition to that. As I love Substack, I’m researching and implementing the most optimized use of the platform I can. The vision I’m laying out here is everything I currently foresee doing, and I will share all the details as I have them.
The Vision
Part 1
Your author site is the Substack dedicated to your fiction, and you will share at least one short story, chapter, or article a week.
Your second Substack will be an implementation of the Right-Reader Method.
Turn on paid subscriptions for both Substacks but offer no incentives at this point. If anyone pays, thank them, but it is vital that you don’t seek to do anything special for them at this time. It will undermine your general efforts if done too soon, and that’s not what your supporters want. (I’ll write about this soon.)
There is the possibility of a third Substack, but that possibility should be held in reserve until you’re ready to implement the second list from the vision and are certain that Substack is the best means for that implementation.
Gain access to the $100 Bookfunnel plan and participate in promotions to give away a book as a reader magnet in exchange for people signing up for your newsletter.
[Hold this spot for the second list.]
Choose a platform and set up your book store for direct sales.
Post invitations for readers to visit your book store and track the success of those efforts.
Tracking success is done by comparing click-thrus to either the number of likes or interactions overall.
As you track you’ll make adjustments and track again. While traffic is too low to generate steady sales, you want to refine the system so that is operates at peak efficiency when needed.
Offer a free book in your welcome email. Have that link bring them to your bookstore where you have a book set to free. This will usually be one of the two books you’ve chosen to offer for free on various Bookfunnel promotions, if you have enough books to allow for two. If possible, the two books should be as different from each other as possible.
Grow your mailing list.
Participate in Bookfunnel sales promotions for discounted books. The promotion will point to your bookstore where the book is discounted.
Publish wide. When your email list begins generating sales and those sales generate fans, they’ll tell others about you. You want people to find your book wherever they look.
Reach 2,500 subscribers. Estimates for conversion are 5%. So to drive a single purchase with each post, every post will need to drive 20 people to the bookstore. If 10% of readers interact with a post, and 10% of those click through to the bookstore, you’ll need 2,000 people to read a post in order to generate a single purchase. To drive 2k views, you’ll probably need 2,500 subscribers.
Set your next goal.
That’s list number one, but there’s a second list that runs alongside this list. I’m keeping it separate to avoid confusion, but consideration should be given before you decide on what bookstore to use.
Part 2
When talking about upselling to your mailing list, we want to keep in mind that this is a fanbase who trusts you and with whom you’ve spent significant time building a relationship. Your choices need to honor both them and your reputation as a storyteller.
The upsell is important because fiction is an increasingly difficult business to generate any real cash flow, and you deserve to make money from your writing. This upsell can come in many forms, but we’ve recently seen it in action at Substack in the form of merchandise, where merchandise was emblazoned with the logo of a series’ fictional town. When you’re thinking about a bookstore, if you know you want to sell merchandise, you probably want to look at something like Fourthwall.
It may be that your stories tie into something you're knowledgeable about and could offer courses. Fourthwall and PayHip allow you to offer courses, as does the platform I’m working with right now. I’ll talk about that soon in another article, and it’s not a bookstore solution.
Speaking of which, the upsell doesn’t have to be part of your bookstore. For Literary Salon, I decided to go in an entirely different direction and not do the bookstore. (ThaddeusThomas.com has one.) In this case, it operates as a distinct business and can generate additional traffic outside the newsletters.
Or, it may be that the upsell is nestled within Substack, either as a section of your existing newsletter or as its own publication which can be marketed to your reader mailing list but is generating a mailing list of its own as well. Jenna is building this model with her guided meditation podcast.
Consider the upsell possibilities that best suit you and your readers.
Research platforms and consider whether you want it to be its own thing, part of your bookstore, part of your newsletter, or its own newsletter.
Prepare the business while your list is growing.
Launch the business (Part 1)
You can launch early using the model we’re using for the bookstore, but selling books is expected. This has a surprise factor, so you can also chose to:
Launch when you have big enough fanbase to generate buzz.
Launch the business (Part 2)
Popular business theories advise you to launch when you have a minimal viable product.
You’ve still got some work to do for the product to achieve your ultimate vision, but the minimal viable product will:
tell you if there’s a market,
indicate if your initial pricing concepts are on target; and
allow you to gather early feedback.
I have a warning here:
when you start your Substack, you have no subscribers. There are no witnesses. My strategy was to act now and fix later, and in that situation, it makes sense.
you’re talking about your mailing list, the fanbase you’ve nurtured all this time—anything you bring needs to be honest and transparent. If you’re rolling out a minimal viable product, tell them that (in words that will be more meaningful.) “Guys, I want to introduce you to an early form of something I’ve been working on for a while. It’s not where I want it to be, yet, but I need some feedback from people I trust. Let me know what you think, and when the next version comes out, I’ll upgrade you for free.”
Part 3
Propagate Russian talking-points for $100k a week.
There is no part three, yet, but we’re only 2.5 months into this journey. There’s time.
Side Hack that’s Clever as Heck: Jenna’s meditation podcast serves as the Right-Reader Method’s nonfiction account because it’s closely tied to her themes AND it’s the business she’s building. That’s brilliant. If you can be like Jenna, be like Jenna.
There are some numbers to keep in mind as we consider where we’re going. First of all, we’re all in this for the love of writing. If that’s all you want, that’s fine. Likewise, making enough money to augment your income is a reasonable goal. That’s my primary long-term goal, but the fact that I include the word primary suggests I hold additional monetary aspirations.
They say with taxes and the loss of benefits, an American making a salary of 100k would have to make 140k to replace it, self-employed.
Maybe that 1.4 multiplier doesn’t track across pay levels, I don’t know, but it’s a start. We’ll have a rough idea what we’d need to make to replace our current income.
How much do you make per book? How many books would you need to sell?
Here’s what I’m left with. The best chance to make a living through our fiction isn’t to make a living by selling our fiction. Our relationship with our audience becomes the springboard for our businesses.
The evidence tells us there’s a glass ceiling for most fiction authors. To keep that from limiting the business, it shouldn’t be a part of the author site. It has its own newsletter, with its own subscribers—and it should be connected to an outside platform that allows you to offer the same material in a more tempting package for consumption, a platform with a myriad ways of structuring price, including subscriptions.
And it would be nice if that platform has a marketplace with a track-record of increasing your business by 10%. This is the platform I’m using to build my business beyond Substack. Yes, it’s a referral link. The PayHip link was Jenna’s referral link. Learn to be okay with that. We’re all supporting one another.
I’ll do a full reveal later, but you can explore the platform for yourself now.
Best-case scenario, 10% of subscribers convert to paid.
At $50 per subscription, 10% of one thousand is $5,000 a year. Do the math from there to figure out what you need.
Don’t tell me readers won’t pay $50 a year. They like you because of your fiction and the relation you’ve built, but they won’t pay that much…for fiction. You’re selling them something else.
$50 a year isn’t your big offer, either. It’s a very reasonable expectation for the value you’ll provide. The big offer will be… well… a bigger offer. Much bigger.
When Substack suggests that you make the Paid subscription $80 and the Founder subscription $150. It’s a psychological ploy to increase your perceived value. Even so, your business’s big offer has to be real. Every major benefit of that offer has to be worth the price on it’s own, and it has to be priced at a level that if someone pays for it, you’ll be happy to make good on the offer. That’s a delicate balance, and it needs careful consideration.
Finding Your Business
You’re helping people like you. They're your fans, and you know them as one fan knows another. You know their pains. You know their pleasure.
Your business will be giving them what they want while taking away that pain or while helping them avoid sacrificing something they love.
We want to sell books and make some money off this love of writing fiction, and I’m building a way to do it without the ad-driven methods that cause such pain. We want to find peace, and Jenna offers to engage you in mediation through the fantasy story-telling you love.
That’s where you begin. Keep a notebook and jot down ideas as they come to you. We’ll get deeper into this process later.
You have time.
—Thaddeus Thomas
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Steampunk Cleopatra: From the title I was expecting swashbuckling adventures against a vaguely Egyptian backdrop, but instead I found a finely crafted and exhaustively researched work of historical fiction, full of mesmerizing detail. The book is studded with details that make the world seem richer and slightly more unfamiliar than you'd expect. These are embedded in a story of palace intrigue, scholarly curiosity and - most importantly - several very different kinds of love.
You have put a lot of thought into this. I would settle for 110 subscribers right now. I admire your vision and cannot wait to see it play out.