Why Aren’t Your Readers Upgrading to Paid?
A poll to better understand the psychology of our readers
cover image by Tumisu (pixabay.com)
Participation in this poll requires you to be a subscriber. It’s a Substack thing and not something I chose. Subscribe for free, and I’ll upgrade you so you’ll have access to everything.
Why Aren’t Your Readers Upgrading to Paid?
What inspires subscribers to upgrade and / or buy your books? To examine this question, we need to examine ourselves as a group. This isn’t meant to change your behavior, merely to understand our psychology as a collective that it might teach us something about our readers.
—Thaddeus Thomas
And now…
Become a Super Fan! (or just grab the book of your choice)
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an epic fantasy of myth and history, told in a series of 100-page novellas
the first books is free
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Download anything and everything in the bookstore
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Can’t wait to finish Kraken in a Coffee Cup? The entire book will be released for Super Fans before the next installment hits the newsletter! Everyone else will have to wait until the serialization is complete.
Exclusive access to a book so racy, I thought I’d hide it away forever—my adults-only horror novel: Ritual and Racita.
Exclusive access to my works-in-progress: The House of Haunted Women and Heartfelt Among the Flying Islands.
There’s no feeling in the world like a bookstore—and when it’s a single-author bookstore where you’re buying directly from the writer, that’s a magic all its own.
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.
Really I just want subscribers and don’t think about the money. I mean it would be good. But I hope people want to read and take something from what I write. Subscribers don’t come very often and it’s the same issue that I am not visible to most of the people who are looking for what I am saying. It’s like trying to sell food to people leaving a restaurant. They’re full.
I’ve actually found Substack and writing to be value in and of itself. For a lot of us writing brings value in other ways. Of course, one would ideally like to be paid, but how else do the majority of people spend their time on social media? So I think if you’re on Substack engaging with thoughtful, well researched, well written, and original writing every day, instead of doom scrolling on other platforms with algorithms which are brainwashing us with content we didn’t ask for, then it’s a much better way to spend your time online.
There are many Substack gurus who teach you how to convert. They mostly involve psychological hacks, and a lot of persistence and cunning (21 times seems to be the magic number before people start engaging). I can recommend a few to anyone who is interested, but for a lot of us that’s just not why we write.
So take the pressure off of trying to get paid readers, enjoy the process of thinking and writing, knowing that you’re basically in the company with the 1% on the internet. The trouble with writing with the sole intention of getting paid, instead of taking the time to build an honest relationship with your writing and your audience, is that it becomes your livelihood, something that becomes tied to your very survival. If it isn’t a pleasant affair, then it becomes yet another trap of our own making. We write to liberate ourselves, and as a fantasy author, I’m sure you can relate!