This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Have you found yourself reading fewer and fewer books? If you have, you're not alone. The greatest challenge for authors, and really anyone who loves books, isn't increased competition. It's not the fact that anyone can easily self-publish a book. It's the fact that there is just so much other entertainment and distractions easily available with the touch of a button on your phone, tablet, or computer.
Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, and today's story features a woman who starts a book subscription club with a twist. This actually has a literal twist, but also a branding twist as well. So two twists for the price of one with today's story. Let's say thank you to today's sponsor, and then I'll tell you all about it.
Abby Jones is a content editor for the fashion brand Superdry. She's also a lifelong lover of books. Abby loves nothing more than immersing herself in the worlds, ideas, and lives of other people in a great book. But as her career progressed, she found herself reading less and less. Between work commitments, her social life, and the ease of other types of entertainment, reading ended up falling by the wayside.
And Abby found she wasn't the only person who felt this way. She found herself talking less and less about books with her friends and colleagues, who also found it hard to make time to read. It was a part of her life that she dearly missed, and she wanted to find a way to make books a bigger part of other people's lives again. She realized the younger generation's biggest problem with reading is that it's not always considered relevant or exciting. The cool thing to do is scroll through your newsfeed or get sucked into a new Netflix series.
You'll find more workplace conversations about the latest season of Stranger Things than the current bestseller. Trying to reconnect with books herself, Abby began to research book clubs and immediately found the same problem. These clubs were almost always targeted at an older generation and focused on books that were, in her opinion, hard to get excited about. None of them felt like they were on the pulse of what was happening in her life. So she resolved to start a book club that was relevant and exciting and had people eagerly awaiting their next read.
She called it the Bad People Book Club. She described it as a book club for people who liked to read and party. And she uses vibrant colors in her branding to create a feel that goes against the usual mental images of a book club. Abby's subscription model begins with a similar form of other book clubs. People can sign up for a package and get a book delivered to their door each month.
But then there are some other features. Subscribers can take part in online discussions via the interactive Bad People Book Club podcast and social media groups. Each box also contains an action for the subscribers to take, such as write a Tinder bio for one of the characters, which can then be shared online. Each book also comes with a unique cocktail recipe to capture the flavor of the book. This recipe is created by a professional mixologist who Abby met through research on Instagram.
She came across her profile and developed a virtual relationship before pitching her on the idea to make the cocktails for Bad People Book Club. The mixologist reads the book and weaves a similar story through the cocktails based on what she read, saw, and felt. For example, she created a sister's whiskey sour inspired by the book Homegoing, which she filled with flavors based on the book's journey through Ghana. Abby also provides the non-alcoholic ingredients in the box to help people make the cocktail. The motivation for this came from an awareness about her target audience.
The ideal reader of Bad People Book Club is of the age where they progress beyond $2 nightclub mixers and are starting to explore the world of craft cocktails. Abby felt it added an extra layer to the storytelling and created a more sensory experience of that month's book. It was a perfect pairing. Bad People Book Club also specializes in sharing books written by women of color. Abby wants to champion more diversity in the publishing world in general and share stories relevant to the struggles that younger people face.
She developed her pricing strategy by assessing how much it costs to buy the books, which she gets from a book distributor, how much it costs to ship them, and then to create all the extra information that comes in the box like that cocktail recipe. A one-off box will cost you $34.99. A quarterly subscription saves you $5 each month, while a year subscription saves even more and costs $349.99. Don't forget the $0.99. So in other words, $350.
She currently delivers these boxes to 300 subscribers and is making just over $1,000 a month. Abby uses Shopify to host the Bad People Book Club's website. She likes the easy-to-use interface, which makes adding pages, text, and custom designs simple. So far, one of her favorite experiences was sitting in a coffee shop and overhearing someone sitting at the table next to her, discussing her business. They were in an animated conversation about the service and the book being read that month.
Abby didn't interject to say who she was. She just took the opportunity to enjoy the moment. For anyone looking to start a similar side hustle, Abby's advice is to focus on your brand first. Get clear on what that brand is. Get clear on what you stand for and who you want to attract.
The Bad People Book Club is not for everyone. And that's good. That's how it should be. This will help the rest of the pieces fall into place and ensure you make more informed decisions as you move forward. Abby has another side hustle in the works.
She is currently pregnant. Congratulations, and wants to devote some of her maternity leave to help grow the business from the comfort of her home. She wants to experiment with more marketing techniques and increase her monthly subscribers. And she's off to a great start. The Bad People Book Club was recently featured as one of the top nine subscription boxes by the Washington Post.
Well, first of all, the Bad People Book Club has a fantastic name. You hear that name and it immediately evokes curiosity, at least for people who might be interested in it. It's probably polarizing in a good way as well, because some people might hear, "Oh, the Bad People Book Club, not into that. I don't want a book club for people who party. I don't need a book club focused on a particular demographic or on young people in general." And as I said, that's just fine because she's speaking to the people who would be interested.
Now, it's been a little while since we've talked about a subscription business like this. So just a couple of comments, these kinds of businesses can be great if you build up enough subscribers. And this is the number one challenge for any kind of subscription business, especially one sending something physical in the mail. It is building up enough initial subscribers to make it worth it, to make it sustainable and scalable to a certain degree. Then the second biggest challenge is keeping those subscribers, because most subscription products have huge churn rates and churn is the metric of subscribers joining in and unsubscribing.
So this is the number one metric that subscription services tend to measure. Not just how many subscribers do I have, but how many are actually sticking around. We've had a couple of episodes focused specifically on subscription boxes like this. I think my favorite one actually has some complexity to it because it's a guy who's sending candy from Japan. So he's an expat living in Japan and shipping out strange and wonderful Japanese candies all over the world.
I believe that was episode one Oh one. So you could find that on the website or just go directly to sidehustleschool.com slash one Oh one. If you're interested. As I sign off for the day, I want to say congratulations again to Abby, the bad people book club sounds awesome. I will check it out myself.
I also love that little twist of the cocktail recipe that comes with each subscription box. And for you over there, don't forget inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. This is episode 553. So today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com slash 553 go and check it out. I will link up everything I discussed in this episode and maybe some additional resources as well.
Thank you for listening. As the week draws to a close, I'll be back tomorrow with a weekly recap and then many more stories next week. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is side hustle school.
