Book Lover Ships Out Fantasies for Profit

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Welcome friends, listeners, Side Hustle School community. Excited to bring you this story today. It's all about an avid reader from Michigan who turns her passion into income with two fairy tale profit centers. Every month she ships out a couple of hundred books to happy subscribers. That's right, it's a subscription box model.

We'll look at the economics of running this service on a platform called Crate Joy. Why is it interesting? What are the benefits? What are the drawbacks? And what do you need to know if you'd like to try it yourself?

The story is called Book Lover Ships Out Fantasies for Profit. It's coming up in just 30 seconds. [Music]

Kaitlyn Perick has an insatiable love for reading, especially young adult fiction, also known as YA. One day she noticed that her local bookstore was selling used books for as little as $1 each, and they were flying off the shelves. It got her thinking, if they could make a profit off used books, why couldn't she?

While she had just graduated college and landed a full-time job as an accountant, she'd also been looking to make a little extra cash. With her love of reading, selling books seemed like it could be the perfect side hustle. Kaitlyn was familiar with the monthly subscription box model and thought it might be a great way to package used books. To sweeten the deal, she added a stash of tea and a bookmark to create an ideal gift. Wanting to keep things simple and to concentrate on books she loved, she decided to offer boxes focused on one of three genres, mystery, romance, or young adult fiction.

Her first books and boxes cost her just $150. And with that, Literary Dream Krait was born. She hosted her book box subscription on a website called Krait Joy. The site provides her with a built-in audience of subscription box enthusiasts and a simple e-commerce platform. There are no upfront costs, only a fee for each transaction.

In her first month, she received seven subscribers. A good start, especially since they'd be paying monthly. However, she quickly learned a couple important things. First, her audience really just wanted to focus on the books. They didn't need the tea or bookmarks.

So she replaced her original box with a straightforward envelope containing just one or two books and offered plans beginning as low as $6.25 per shipment. Additionally, she was forced to remove YA fiction from her genre options after discovering that used copies of that genre were difficult to find. Despite her very affordable pricing model, Kalyn's eye for great bargains helped to keep her costs down. Over the next few months, orders picked up. But after a year of running Literary Dream Krait, Kalyn found herself a bit uninspired.

YA fiction was her favorite genre, and she was disappointed to not be working with it. So she decided to launch another book-based subscription box, this one focusing only on newly released hardcover YA fantasy. And she called this one fantasy monthly. With this box, she fully embraced her largely female audience. She created multiple tiers, multiple pricing options, ranging from a basic book box to a deluxe option that includes teas, candles, bath bombs, charms, bookmarks, and more.

In order to connect with her readers, she started an online book club to discuss the book of the month, the one that she'd be sending out, and she's cultivated a whole community of fellow YA book lovers. Kalyn invested what she had learned for Literary Dream Krait into the rollout of fantasy monthly. She planned to deliberate pre-launch, spending time to build up a targeted social media following, something she wished she'd done with the first subscription. She pulled in other organic marketing strategies, such as reaching out to YouTubers. And not stopping there, Kalyn got serious about Instagram, spending time on the platform daily to grow her account to over 5,000 followers.

This thoughtful rollout worked, leading to 40 subscribers in the month after launch. With the end goal in mind, Kalyn didn't hold back and she invested in her new adventure. She purchased custom boxes as well as brand new books and supplies. Startup costs were higher the second time around, this time around $1,300, but she knew what she was doing. When Kalyn set out, one of her primary goals for fantasy monthly was to make it affordable, since most YA book subscriptions are over $30 a month.

And she's done just that with a basic box price at just $17 and a deluxe option still competitive at $32. Although lower than most, Kalyn's rate still provided her with a healthy profit margin, thanks in large part to careful budgeting and meticulous research to uncover great deals. She's able to source some of her new books for fantasy monthly directly from the publisher at a 50% discount. And for literary dream crate, she recently booked a huge deal where she bought out a used bookstore that was going out of business. That brought her enough stock to meet demand for the next three months.

On average, Kalyn puts in about a week's worth of attention each month for her two subscriptions, mostly to package up all the boxes. She still does everything on her own at home, alongside her full-time job, but she's got the process down to an assembly line. With nearly 200 active subscribers, she's profiting more than $1,000 a month. Catering to fellow bookworms has allowed Kalyn to pay off her credit card bill and enjoy nice meals from time to time. Plus, the work revolves around something she already loves to do with the added perk of attending book festivals, as well as interacting with a community of passionate readers.

She's looking forward to gaining more subscribers in the holiday season. And when Kalyn's not boxing up the next delivery, she's working on publishing a novel of her own. [Music]

All right, Austin Project, our awesome couple of projects. Congratulations to Kalyn. It's really great to see how she learns lessons along the way, applies them, does better, et cetera, building that subscription base, which is really what it's all about when it comes to a subscription box service.

Now, let's talk specifically about CrateJoy. I wanna discuss this platform. CrateJoy essentially is a service that has this built-in community of subscription box enthusiasts. They also help you manage a lot of logistics. And they don't do this out of the kindness of their heart.

Of course, they take a transaction fee. But it can be a really great thing for a lot of people because your greatest challenge in running a subscription box service is building up enough subscribers to make it worth it. Because it takes a lot of work to get started, if you only have three subscribers after three months, you're not gonna be doing that well. So if you can get it launched well, if you can get that initial pool of people, you know, that's what it's all about because then you have predictable recurring income, which is so, so valuable. So a couple of other CrateJoy stories from our archives that I wanna refer you to if you're interested in pursuing this more.

Episode 678, "Nature-Loving Neighbors Create Kids Subscription Box." Episode 685, "Comic Book Curator Creates Custom Crate Subscription." And 934, "Sigar Subscription Box Delivers Smoking Returns." So there we've got a subscription box for kids, something about comic books and something about cigars. So if you compare those to this one, you can see there's all kinds of different topics. Those are just a few examples. Your subscription box could be a lot of different things, but all of the successes in this field, in this category, tend to have a few things in common. They really are inspiring loyalty from their subscribers.

They've learned a bit about branding. They have good customer service, which is essential in this field. So go listen to those if you're interested. We'll link them all up on the show notes page. In our notes with Kalyn, she also mentioned an online resource called Subscription School, which has a bunch of free YouTube tutorials and a Facebook group.

So we'll link that up as well. Those notes are gonna be at situssleschool.com/1063. Episode 1063. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Thanks so much, my friends.

I'll be back again tomorrow, and I hope you'll join me. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

- From the Onward Project.