AuthorPass: The Right Marketing Choice For Authors

HOST: It's good to have you back, Bo. Last time, we dove into Groops and the power of niche communities. But today, I want to talk about AuthorPass. You once described it as a kind of "set it up and forget about it" solution for book marketing, but that can mean different things. What does AuthorPass do that's genuinely different from an author subscribing to all those tools individually? GUEST: Well, first of all, it saves them a lot of time. Subscribing to all the different tools obviously takes time, going to the website, subscribing, and then you have to like fill out the basic form about whatever the website says. For example, if it needs your book, your book cover, if it needs like your name and and address, let's say if you're doing a press release or something. There could be a lot of data required for each of the services, and you have to fill that out over and over again. That's one thing. Another very important thing is the cost. By doing everything individually, you're going to be paying for each service. So what the Author Pass does, not only does it streamline everything, so you fill out just a few fields initially, and it takes that information and it distributes it everywhere for all these different services, but it also saves you a lot of money. You're paying probably about 25% of what you would pay if you just bought all the services individually. HOST: You say you only fill out a few fields, so how does it actually gather enough detail to do things like create a press release or generate a review? Is that all AI driven or do you supplement that with something else? GUEST: We ask the user exactly what we need for all these different forms to be filled out. Now the good news is for most of the authors that use this service, they're already going to have their books in our system. So when they fill out the form, it pulls all the information that they've already entered before including like uploaded the file, the cover, the description, the genre, and the whatever else they they may include in that form. So the information is already there. But we also add a whole bunch of fields that all these different services can use. And we set up these forms to make it optional in that if you really care about being incredibly accurate and you want and you don't want AI to be creative, let's say in your press release or in some other descriptions for the different services, you can enter information and be as complete as possible. But it still only takes like maybe 5 10 minutes at at the most. Um or if you're kind of lazy like I am a lot and you you don't want to fill out all these forms, again, you just select your book, it auto populates everything. You just look it over and then you press submit. HOST: Got it. So it can be highly tailored or automated depending on their preference. Thinking about the kind of author this is right for — you've said before that profitable publishing is the hard part. For someone just starting out with one book and no big audience, is AuthorPass the right first move, or do you need some kind of foundation in place first for this marketing machinery to be effective? GUEST: No, you do not. In fact, it's all about the uh the brand new author. And this is this is the tough part with marketing because most of the marketing strategies out there work well when you have a huge following. Then you can you can look at different marketing strategies and you could you could tweak them and you could test them out. You could do AB testing because you have that audience already. Especially if you have these large social media followings, it's easy to market a book. It's easy to market a business or anything. However, if you're just starting out as a new author and you don't have this huge following and tons of people don't know about your book, this is the place to start. None of these services that are in this package require a subscription already like a a um subscribed reader base or a large following on on x.com or Facebook or any of the platforms. You could literally have nobody that knows about your book and this will be the right call for you. HOST: That's interesting because it directly contradicts a lot of common advice for authors to build an audience first. So, what kind of results do you see new authors getting with AuthorPass? How quickly can they start seeing some momentum? GUEST: Well, to be honest, this author pass is a new program. I I can't say it's brand new because we have uh this is probably the third iteration of the author pass. And what we've been doing from the first time we introduced this about six months ago, this is when we had just a few different services. And it's been working well for for many people. And people also appreciate the 10% discount that comes with the author pass on all the other services that they they buy. Uh but I knew we could do better. And I I couldn't do better until we actually built the sites. And now, you know, prior six months ago, we had maybe like three or four different author websites. Now we're up to we're we're approaching 40 different websites. And and that's 40, not four. So there's a lot of different services we have, and now we can incorporate all of this within the author pass. So, um, we are predicting that it's going to be a very good thing for a lot of people. HOST: Okay, so it gets updated constantly with new sites and capabilities as you build the portfolio. You're setting up things like reader community pages and author sites. What happens if an author cancels their subscription after a few months? Do those pages and sites stay live, or do they disappear? GUEST: Yeah, that's a good question and a question that most authors would have. And the answer is for all of the one-time services, those stay on forever. Those are eternal. So, uh uh like the book gist, the uh the review site, um the video that gets created, all of the one-time things that that's theirs to keep. The only thing that gets canceled is the monthly service. Like so if all of their pages on groups.com, their hosting site, um and there's like five others as well. And but that's where the real meat is. So, all of the all of the services that we do at initially, that's really good to jump start this program and to and also to be used in all of these other services. For example, like we create the press release, we create the video, and these are part of the website that we build for the book. So, although we do it once, the website is what carries those out and hosts those and displays those month after month after month. So, that's the important part. So, it's it is important to to keep this service going month after month, but if they do cancel, it's those monthly services that stop and they could take all of those assets that we created initially and they could just distribute them on their own or or share them on social media, do whatever they wish with them. HOST: Okay, so those assets still live on. You mentioned 10% discounts on other services — is the stated yearly value you claim on the site calculated by comparing the bundle price to the sum of all your platform memberships, or is it based on those discounts on other services? GUEST: It's based on the discounts they would get on the services. So they we set it at we set a cap at $1,000 discount per year. So that's so they could basically spend $10,000 on marketing services per year and they would take full advantage of the discount. And that that's really the high end of marketing. Most people don't come close to that in terms of book marketing. So we figure that this will cover 99.9% of all clients. HOST: Got it. So for an author with a backlist — let's say they have ten or twenty titles — is AuthorPass the right move, or are those discounts and memberships not scalable once you have a bigger catalog? GUEST: We actually created this latest iteration of the program specifically with that in mind, that is, authors with multiple books. And not just a few books, you could have unlimited books, which of course nobody has. It's mathematically impossible, but you could have many, many books. Uh there's no hard limit, let's say, to how many books you could use in this program. So the standard author pass is $49 a month, and the unlimited is $99 a month. So you just double the price and you could have, you know, 100, 200, 1,000 times as many books. The uh the thing is each book is $99 set up because of all of those assets we initially create. That cost has to be covered and the $99 per book covers that.We actually created this latest iteration of the program specifically with that in mind. That is, authors with multiple books. And not just a few books, you could have unlimited books. Which of course nobody has, it's mathematically impossible. But you could have many, many books. Uh there's no hard limit, let's say, to how many books you could use in this program. So the standard author pass is $49 a month, and the unlimited is $99 a month. So you just double the price and you could have, you know, 100, 200, a thousand times as many books. The uh the thing is, each book is $99 set up because of all of those assets we initially create. That cost has to be covered. Uh and the $99 per book covers that. HOST: You mentioned Unlimited — what exactly distinguishes the Single and Unlimited tiers in terms of what they offer? Is it just the number of books you can use, or do you treat backlist titles differently with either plan? GUEST: the monthly services. So for all the monthly services, instead of giving you the uh or giving the the the author the lower account, we give them the highest account that allows for unlimited titles. So that's the major difference there. HOST: Before we go—for listeners who want to follow up on what we covered, where can they find you and the work you're doing? GUEST: Well, you can go to selfpublishing pro that is the master site for almost all the tools we have including AuthorPass. And just browse around and if you have any questions, there is a chat box that will go right to customer service and they can answer any questions.Thanks for sharing that, Bo. It was great to hear how AuthorPass ties all these tools together, especially that "laziness principle" you mentioned about making it as seamless as possible for authors. And thank you for listening. Let's get you back on soon, Bo—we still have live data to check in on. Until next time—that's a wrap.