#PublishingReinvented 192 - Did U Know About The Success of Subscription Boxes? Would You Be Part of This?
The above is one example of a book subscription box.
Welcome to publishing in the era of the subscription box: membership schemes in which readers pay a monthly fee to receive a book — often a special edition, and often with accompanying merchandise. There are dozens of these box companies, some with tens of thousands of subscribers, and they are the new kingmakers — actually queen-makers, the services are mainly run by women for young women readers — of the bestseller charts.
“I don’t like to give exact numbers, but we’re in the tens of thousands in terms of our current subscriber base. Our wait list is thousands and thousands of people long — you’re waiting, I don’t know, three to six months, before you are offered a spot,” Tonge, the founder and chief executive of Illumicrate, says. She has hired 19 employees and started her own publishing imprint, Daphne Press. It has published 13 books and sold 52,021 copies since it launched in March last year, according to Nielsen BookScan.
These are the extras with this month’s offer:
Our Illumicrate Exclusive edition is a signed Royal hardback and features:
An exclusive cover (from the publisher)
Full colour printing on the hardback (by @alawinans)
Digitally printed fore-edge (from the publisher); block sprayed top & bottom edge
Illustrated endpapers (@hoanglapdoan, different front and back)
Signed by the author
Here’s a list of 14 Subscription services.
It was a similar story for FairyLoot, a fantasy-specific box launched by Anissa de Gomery in 2016 — when she was just 23. “FairyLoot was my first actual job,” de Gomery says. Like Tonge, she was a book blogger, and had tried and failed to get into the publishing industry after moving to London from Bangkok. Eight years on, she is making money her strapped-for-cash contemporaries in publishing can only dream of.
“It took a surprisingly long time to figure out how to buy the books,” de Gomery says, remembering how her partner would box up the books in their living room. She had to cold call publishers. “I still remember saying, ‘Today we’re going to buy 100 books, but in the future we’re going to buy 1,000.’ I didn’t think that was as close on the horizon as it was.”
De Gomery is tight-lipped about figures — “I will just say that we have thousands of subscribers from all around the world, and the wait list continues to grow … Since 2020 we’ve had 300 per cent growth. That’s the most conservative answer” — but since FairyLoot announced a new romantasy box last year tens of thousands have joined the waiting list. In publishing, those are big numbers.
Why it matters:
“A large confirmed advance sale virtually guarantees a bestseller chart position on publication, and in turn increases interest in the selected title from the rest of the book trade,” says Juliet Mabey, publisher of Oneworld. “One of our YA science fiction and fantasy titles, Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao, was picked by Illumicrate for a subscription box, ensuring thousands of sales registered that first week, and it went straight into the UK top ten chart as a result.”
This is part of the changing landscape for books.
Books were always gifts, now they are beautiful monthly gifts we can give ourselves.
Apps are becoming popular too. See some here.
The key thing for me is that you have to know what is going on in your genre.
This also pushes me towards using the best options in IngramSpark for the jacketed case laminate option. It allows indies to not only have a fancy book jacket with flaps, but also print whatever artwork we would like on the hard cover underneath.
Add a map, a signature page and a fancy book marker and something else and we have a great gift for the holidays.
What do you think?
Email me if you’d like to be included, to have a special edition made for you or if you’d like to subscribe to one and what genre you would like: lob@yourasms.com
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