Monthly Subscription Options are NOW AVAILABLE!

We’re excited to announce that we’ve released a much requested feature for authors: Monthly Subscriptions! Rather than charge a single fee for an entire year’s access to your books, authors can now charge monthly for access, allowing for more predictable, recurring revenue. Annual subscription options remain available. Authors can utilize both at once to give readers options, or choose to do only a monthly or annual option. 

For example, an author could give readers two subscriptions options:

$3 a month

$30 a year.

$3 x 12 = $36, so someone paying $30 up front would get the equivalent of two months free.

Monthly subscriptions, coupled with the ability to schedule chapter releases, make Laterpress a great place to serialize fiction or provide early access to your most dedicated readers. 

This is a good time to remind folks that there are two different kinds of subscriptions authors can set up with Laterpress:

Author Subscriptions - An Author subscription grants readers access to everything an author has published through Laterpress, unless that content is locked behind a separate collection subscription.

Collection Subscriptions - These subscriptions provide access only to the content contained within a single collection. You could use collections to sort books by pen name, if you have multiple. Collections could also be dedicated to individual series, short story collections, genres, and more. Any content locked behind a collection subscription is not available to readers who purchase an author subscription. Those readers must also purchase the collection subscription.

We recommend authors choose between doing an author subscription or using collection subscriptions. We generally do not recommend using both types simultaneously. If you do, be extremely mindful of what books fall under each subscription. It is possible to create an author subscription that offers readers nothing if all books are published into collections with their own subscriptions.

For more detailed information on how to set up monthly subscriptions, or to see screenshots of what the payment flow looks like from a reader’s POV, please see our new help article.

While you’re setting up subscriptions, here’s a reminder on how you can create subscription renewal reminders for your readers through Stripe. If you need to create a Stripe account to start monetizing your books, this guide can help with that.