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The Author Stack by Russell Nohelty
"Your first sale probably won't, and shouldn't, be your membership. Think of other products like courses and books that give people discrete wins."
Ciler Demiralp
December 01, 2024
Your go-to source for building a successful newsletter business.
Happy Sunday, everyone!
This week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Russell Nohelty, the creator of The Author Stack.
I will share key insights from our conversation here, but for the full interview, be sure to check out our website. Enjoy!
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Number of active & inactive newsletters
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👋 MEET THE CREATOR
Russell Nohelty is a USA Today bestselling author, speaker, publisher, and a six-figure creative human since 2017.
He has run a small press called Wannabe Press since 2015 where they have put out 50+ titles, and in the past few years, their revenue has increased from $10k/mo to $30k/mo.
Besides his six-figure businesses, he runs a newsletter called The Author Stack, which shares business strategies for authors with over 46,000 subscribers and almost 1,000 paid members.
In this interview, Russell talked about
Why he started a newsletter while running a 6-figure business
Step-by-step growth strategies to reach over 46,000 subscribers
His paid subscription strategies to reach over 1,000 paid members
Why he advises newsletter operators to diversify their monetization channels
TOOL STACK
1. Experiment with different offers to keep people becoming paid members and staying as paid ones.
Russell has almost 1,000 paying members.
“The best driver is easily our ‘pledge drives’. Every quarter we have a pay-what-you-can-afford event where you can get discounts up to 80%.”
Every time Russell and his team do pledge drives, they get 100-200 new paid members.
Plus, they do “flash sales” a couple of times, which are one-day events with steep discounts down to $8/yr.
However, The Author Stack has 46,000 subscribers, so even if only 0.3% of the audience attends an event that Russell hosts or becomes a paid member, that still exceeds 100 people.
So the number of people coming and becoming paid members is much more than any newsletter with 1,000 subscribers.
“People try these strategies with 500 subscribers, and it just isn’t worth the effort. Scale has its own leverage.”
Russell and his team offer almost 900 exclusive member posts, including books, articles, courses, and more, which people can access. He also gives additional articles during the week, including his one free article, to paid members.
2. Diversify your revenue sources
“Your first sale probably won’t, and shouldn’t, be your membership.
Try to think of other products, like courses and books, that can work with your membership, but give people discrete wins they can take without going all in on a membership with you.”
Russell thinks that people will usually need to subscribe for a long time before they become paying members, but they will buy a book much more quickly, even if it costs much more than a subscription and gives them much less.
Paid subscribers only make up 10% of The Author Stack revenue.
The biggest revenue comes from their conference, Writer MBA, our Future of Publishing Mastermind, book launches, and courses.
Russell packages his work up at least once a year and sells it. He makes sure to launch them on his own site or Kickstarter first to capture their information.
3. Serve something that has never been served before.
“There are literally no other resources online like The Author Stack.
Zero, and I know because if there was I wouldn’t have to write what I write. I only write it because nobody else will talk about it.”
Russell’s goal is to write in ways that connect craft and commerce, and show that it doesn’t have to be icky to make money. In fact, it’s how you do more of the work you love.
Russell has done it the hard way for most of his career and succeeded.
And now, people trust what he says because he has been there for 20 years doing creative work at a high level.
He worked hard and now he is serving his unique journey with others to help them build their own journey.
👉 Do you want to reach 2,800 newsletter operators & enthusiasts?
Thanks for reading, and don’t hesitate to reply if you want to contact me.
Ciler
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