How This Novelist Gives Back To Her Biggest Fans… The Easy Way

Shelli Varela: Many would-be authors think that getting a publishing deal is the pinnacle of their success. Today’s guest is a profoundly successful author who decided to use a membership site to leverage her success and build a thriving business.

 

Stu McLaren: There is a big trend brewing that’s revolutionizing the way business is being done. Big companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple are jumping on this too but so are thousands of others in all kinds of markets like photography and calligraphy, fitness, finance, meal planning, lesson planning, dog training, and so many more, and they’re doing it by shifting to a recurring revenue model. Hi. My name is Stu McLaren and for more than a decade I’ve been helping tens of thousands of entrepreneurs generate recurring revenue through membership sites. Join our host, Shelli Varela, as she takes you behind-the-scenes to see how these companies are building a thriving tribe that spends with them every single month. Now, let’s get to today’s episode.

 

[INTERVIEW]

 

Shelli Varela: Maryrose Wood, welcome to the It’s a TRIBE Thing Podcast. How are you?

 

Maryrose Wood: I’m very well. How are you, Shelli?

 

Shelli Varela: I’m great. I am really excited to dive into your story because I am a storyteller and I appreciate people that love the art of storytelling. So, when I started reading about what you’re doing and what you’re putting out into the world, and how it came to be, I was super excited. So, I’m happy to share you with our listeners and wondered if you would start by telling us who you are, who you serve, and the beginning parts of your origin story.

 

Maryrose Wood: Oh, yeah. You make me feel like a superhero already. We all have an origin story, right? We all had that moment in life where we discovered our superpower. Well, I’m Maryrose Wood. I’m a writer and now I’m an entrepreneur, which is amazing to even say. It feels so good to say. I started my creative journey as a young person in love with stories but not knowing what my place was. I started my career as an actor. I fell in love with the theater as a teen and went through my 20s as a performer primarily and, you know, started to study improv and just really kept trying on clothes that didn’t fit, if you know what I mean?

 

Shelli Varela: Well, but.

 

Maryrose Wood: Yeah. We all go through this. And then by the end of my 20s, I was like, “Oh, I know, I’m a writer,” and definitely, my journey through acting and improv and stuff led me to that. So, we regret nothing, right? We take value and learning from all of our little, our turns along the way but I’m like, “Okay, I’m a writer, but I had been a theater person for my whole life until that point.” And so, I was a dramatic writer. I wrote plays, I wrote musicals, I wrote screenplays. That kind of took me through my 30s. When I was in my 40s, I completely out of the blue gotten an inquiry from a friend of mine who had been tapped, she was also a theater writer, but she’d been tapped by a big publisher to write this new thing called YA. It was the early days of YA fiction, you know, which is now like ruling the world.

 

Shelli Varela: YA meaning young adult.

 

Maryrose Wood: YA meaning young adult, which is really books published for teen but if you look at popular culture, the world of YA fiction is like the Harry Potter and the Hunger Games and all these huge franchises, Twilight. That kind of came out of the publishers deciding that this was a really a vibrant space to target. But this was early days so my friend was like, “You know, YA.” I was like, “What’s YA?” So, a total unexpected swerve in my early 40s that I pitched a couple of ideas to write YA to a publisher and got my first book contract with Random House and two book deals, never having written a word of fiction.

 

Shelli Varela: Wow. That’s incredible, first of all.

 

Maryrose Wood: Well, it sounds incredible and it’s sort of like don’t try this at home, you know, because it was definitely my strange journey into getting published. But what happened was that I became an author. I taught myself how to write fiction. Obviously, I had a lot of storytelling background. You know, I’ve been writing plays and thinking about stories my whole life but I never anticipated becoming a novelist. So, that happened in my early 40s. And now I’m in my late 50s and my 14th novel is going to be published in 2020.

 

Shelli Varela: Congratulations. That’s so incredible.

 

Maryrose Wood: Well, so that was kind of like an accidental on-ramp to a highway that I never planned to be on and it’s just turned into the meaning of my life. So, I’m a great believer in serendipity. And what happened was that I became kind of best known among my books today is a series of books called The Incorrigible Children Of Ashton Place and it’s a six-book series and I am so proud of these books. The first one came out in 2010. It’s called The Mysterious Howling and then there’s a series so then there’s all these other books. And then book six came out in 2018 called The Long-Lost Home. And so, as you can imagine, that was like a decade of my life. It was like raising a child and I was also raising my own children while I was doing that too as a single mom. So, I got to the end of this journey and I had this relationship with my readers that was this kind of like, “Oh, they’d send me fan mail,” or I’d go to the bookstore, and they’d come and see me, and then the books were over. And I was left with this sense of like there’s so much more to say. I don’t want to give up my relationship with my readers in quite this way, you know.

 

Shelli Varela: Can I just jump in real quick on that?

 

Maryrose Wood: Totally.

 

Shelli Varela: Just for context for the people listening, like these readers and these fans were fanatical about this book in a way that rarely happens like they were insatiable with their desire and their hunger for the journey to continue.

 

Maryrose Wood: Well, I tell you, it’s so funny because sometimes if you’re just quiet and you listen to what the universe is telling you, you get a pretty clear signal. My readers all along were saying, “We love these books. We want more. We want to be in this world more.” And just to give some context to that, the books are set in Victorian England and the main character is a teenage girl named Miss Penelope Lumley, who is a graduate of a school called The Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females. And at the beginning of the series, she’s newly graduated from the school and she gets her first job as a governess, shades of Jane Eyre here, but the job that she gets is this grand house called Ashton Place, she soon discovers is to teach three children who were actually raised by wolves. So, it’s a complex comic mystery where she has to not only solve the mystery of who these children are and who left them in the woods and why but figure out how to get them to behave like proper Victorian British children and stop acting like wild animals.

 

So, there’s a lot of world. She’s teaching them. She’s solving the mystery. There’s all kinds of subsidiary characters. You know, we traveled with them to London. We traveled with them back to the Swanburne Academy where we meet her teachers. And so, the world of the books is very rich. There are wise sayings that are the mottos of her school’s founder, Agatha Swanburne, that are sprinkled throughout the book. There’s all kinds of little details like the pillows at the school that have the wise sayings stitched upon them that we find everywhere and all kinds of fun things. So, just like in a beloved series, like the Harry Potter series, just this all kinds of things that want to jump out of the books and into people’s lives. So, people were like, “How can I learn how to do needlepoint of the pillows? And where can I get a recipe for the biscuits that the children like to eat?” And you know, “Oh Miss Penelope Lumley is teaching them the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. We’ve been inspired to study the work of Edgar Allan Poe at home because of these books.” So, there was a lot of impulse always from the readers to kind of take the world of the books and put it in their own lives. Well, this brings me to the question, “Why start a membership?” because clearly, look, I have no shortage of things to do in my life.

 

Shelli Varela: Maybe write some more books.

 

Maryrose Wood: I’m still actively writing and I’ve got a lot going on but I was thinking and thinking and thinking after the series was done, what can I do to serve my readers and to serve my own desire to keep this world going and to give them what they’re asking for? They want bonus content. They want a collection of the sayings of Agatha Swanburne. They want all these things from me. And I talked to my publisher. I’ve been very fortunate to work with the big publishers. These books are published by Harper Collins who are wonderful, and I talked to them and as supportive as they are, wholeheartedly supportive of the books, the kinds of things that we’re talking about don’t fit into a mold. They don’t fit into like a corporate mold. There’s no business model for Harper Collins or a publisher of that size to say, “Oh sure, we can do needlepoint patterns and recipes and like bonus fiction and YA sayings,” like, there’s no easy way to say we can create a product at that level for this size readership.

 

So, I was kind of given the challenge of figuring out how to do it on my own and I didn’t know how until I came across the business model of online membership. And it was literally like my mouth hung open and I was like, “This is how I can do it. This is how I can control a business that can really be targeted to serve my particular quirky beautiful readers in the particular quirky beautiful way that they want, that I can create the kind of odd bits and bobs of content that I want to create.” And we can continue a community that’s based and inspired by this world that they already have an attachment to. And then the conceiving of how that might be a business, you know, I quickly realized that there’s a lot of families out there. I learned from experience, of course, that many of my readers are homeschooling families because they really relate to and find inspiration in this notion of these kids learning at home with the governess, right? It’s sort of like cool homeschoolers in Victorian England and with howling too, right, because of the wolves.

 

So, some of them took up howling and started to call mom, you know, mama woo became kind of a thing among my readers. So, I quickly realized that, well, this isn’t really just about the books then. This is about what that experience is. What does it feel like when a family can have fun learning together? When you’ve got little kids, medium-sized kids, and big kids, you’ve got mom or dad, that experience of finding fun, learning together. And the kind of content that I find inspiring myself is challenging. The books in Victorian England, you take small children, you teach them Latin verbs and Shakespeare, and the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. And those things are still really fascinating and it gave me an opportunity to say, “Hey, here’s an interesting way to offer educational content inspired by the world of the books. It continues this fun world that everyone has a relationship to, and it offers like enrichment curriculum for families that want to have fun doing this together.” So, that became my business model and I thought, “What extra special sauce can I add?”

 

Because I know I was a homeschooling mom myself when my kids were young and I know what it’s like as a mom to feel like your job is to be the cheerleader for learning in the household. Like, “Come on, kids. Let’s do math. Let’s get up and read some poetry,” like it sounds so idyllic but we all know anyone who’s raised kids like in real life kids are like, “Yeah, maybe not.” They don’t always come to the table full of energy and vim and vigor and curiosity and that becomes the homeschooling parents’ burden a lot of times to say, “No, no, we’re going to do it.” And I thought that’s what I can do. I can create something that’s so kind of offbeat and quirky and fun that it will support that parent. It’s almost like Miss Penelope Lumley, the governance comes to your house and says, “You know, kids, we’re going to create a guidebook. The birds are outside and we’re going to go out on an excursion. We’re going to do this.” The kids can imagine themselves as the children in the books who are always enthusiastic and will go and learn things with their governess whom they adore. So, that sort of became my mission and I created an opportunity for every month that kids to feedback the work that they’ve done to the membership.

 

[ANNOUNCEMENT]

 

Stu McLaren: So many people in all kinds of niche markets are leveraging their existing knowledge and influence and they’re transforming it into passive monthly income. This isn’t luck. This is a repeatable formula for producing a growing subscription income and if thousands of others can do it, you can too. To find out what type of membership site would be right for your business, visit GetTRIBEGuide.com. Go to GetTRIBEGuide.com and download it today. You’re awesome!

 

[INTERVIEW]

 

Shelli Varela: I am so in awe of how brilliant this is on several levels. And how there are snippets of the journey of your life peppered throughout this entire thing. You know, you talked earlier about being in Broadway and film and TV and improv and the whole sort of theater of that in the way your brilliant mind works, and then going on to both right, but then amalgamating all of that into a membership site that is both educational and entertaining. And for anybody listening out there who is an author or is looking to be an author, you know, the cherry on the sundae here for me is just like, wow, you have this career that most aspiring authors want to journey towards. But the thing that sometimes people don’t realize is even authors, you know, they need to have a business or they need to have something associated with it and what a beautiful and brilliant way to encompass your entire life’s tapestry of experience and then also be able to leverage that as a business for your readers who are so in love with your work.

 

Maryrose Wood: Wow. Well, thank you so much. I have to say one of the things that I’ve really benefited from personally from the experience of doing this and I want to be clear, I’m still in the very early days of doing this. So, I consider myself like a student of membership businesses. I’m learning every day. It’s not like a smooth like, “Oh, and then I opened a membership and I sat on my veranda and I had a cup of tea.” It’s like I have never worked so hard. There’s so much to learn and do but many people that I know who have lives as artists or aspiring artists get stuck in a mindset where you think that you have to please some kind of gatekeeper to get your work out in the world. Oh, I need to be discovered by an agent or I need to get my book published, you know. If only I could get published. And really, it’s not that these goals are not meaningful but we don’t have to wait for permission to do our work in this life.

 

Shelli Varela: Oh, my goodness, Maryrose, say that again. We do not have to wait for permission to do our work in the world.

 

Maryrose Wood: We don’t and it becomes a fear-driven form of procrastination. It’s like, “Yeah. Oh, I wish I were a writer. I’d like to be a writer but, oh, I don’t have any connections,” or, “I can’t afford to take the time off to go get an MFA,” or, “I hear you got to know somebody to get a publishing deal,” like all these excuses, you know, Just do your thing. Dance your dance and get started. And because I’ve had and I’m very grateful for it and will always continue to hopefully as long as they’ll have me, you know, continue to offer books to families who like my writing style and work with publishers because that is like the superhighway of exposure, right? Like it gives you a way of having an impact in the world. But it is not a way that leaves me in complete control and it is a way that puts a lot of players on the field. There’s a lot of agendas if you are going to be commercialized. You know, it’s like the difference between making an indie film and making a big studio production. You know, like there are pros and cons of each, but the ability that we have in this incredible day and age where this technology is available, so widely available, that we can do our thing and just put it out there and interact directly with our people.

 

Our followers, whoever they may be, like if we put ourselves out there, we’ll find each other. And it just takes away all that sense of like, “Oh, I got to wait until someone to give me a break.” It’s like you don’t really. You can give yourself a break right now. And I love for myself having the balance now of doing something that I never anticipated doing, of having a direct relationship with my readers and my members in my membership, which is called The Swanburne Academy. I named it after the school and the books.

 

Shelli Varela: Brilliant. Of course, you did.

 

Maryrose Wood: Of course, I did, right? Why think of something new when I got something I can already use that people will recognize? But my relationship with them now is so intimate and so direct, and I can really drill down and just be as weird as I want to be. I don’t have to worry like, “Oh, is the marketing department at XYZ publisher going to like this? Are the forces of corporate input going to support this book the way I think they should?” There’s a necessary give and take when you work with large organizations, and you can leverage that to a big kind of impact. But you give up that kind of super quirky, intimate individual indie spirit when you do that. So, pros and cons. So, for me, to be able to engage on both levels is so empowering. And you know, I recognize it. It may seem like, “Oh, well, you have book deals and you’ve got books published, like, do you need to feel empowered?” It’s like, “Yeah, I do need to feel empowered.” This has really been a great experience for me to recognize what I can do standing on my own two feet.

 

Shelli Varela: What’s been the biggest compliments or piece of feedback that you have had echoing back or mirroring back from your community as a result of you creating this membership site?

 

Maryrose Wood: Oh, wow. Thank you for asking that question. It’s so sweet. I would say that I love hearing and I have heard from members that my kids have never been so eager to get to work, that the kids are now leading the charge and wanting to go out and learn stuff because it’s stuff that they can relate to from the books and it’s I hope presented in an engaging way. I’ve worked really hard on my site to come up with quirky and really multimedia fun, highly produced ways to offer the content and the opportunity to not only create things but to share them back so that all of the other families who are scattered all over the US and some overseas can form a community of learners and support each other in their creativity and their learning. It’s motivating. So, I feel like that notion that the kids are so enthusiastic.

 

I’ll give you one example. One of the features of the membership is that because the notion of, “When is the full moon?” is a plot point in the books without being too spoilery. It’s not a story about werewolves but something unusual happens on the full moon at Ashton Place in The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place books and so this becomes a kind of an ongoing mystery. So, I decided that I would post a surprise on the full moon every month in the site that there’ll be…

 

Shelli Varela: Oh, this is so juicy. I love it.

 

Maryrose Wood: A new piece of content would come up. It’s the full moon surprise and I got a post on one of my pages the other day because we just had a full moon. You and I are talking a couple of days after this full moon and this mom said, “My kids came to me and they said, ‘It’s the full moon tomorrow. We can’t wait.’ My kids have never been this interested in the phases of the moon before.” And I thought that was just great.

 

Shelli Varela: Well, what a gift it is to make learning fun again. I will definitely be checking your stuff out because I am so inspired and so interested in what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and the impact that you’re creating in the lives of people. And it just really does speak to just be who you are like just absolutely be who you are because if you’re speaking to everybody, you’re speaking to nobody. Instead of going a mile wide and an inch deep, it’s always better to go an inch wide and a mile deep where the people are just in love with who you are and what you do. So, thank you for doing that. And if people are looking for you online, which I definitely will be, what’s the best place they can find you?

 

Maryrose Wood: Well, to get on the waiting list for The Swanburne Academy’s next enrollment, just go to www.SwanburneAcademy.com and if you want to learn more about my books, www.MaryroseWood.com is the place to go.

 

Shelli Varela: Amazing. And just for clarity, how do you spell Swanburne?

 

Maryrose Wood: Oh, thank you for asking. So, Swanburne is spelled S-W-A-N just like the bird, B-U-R-N-E so that’s all one word, Swanburne.

 

Shelli Varela: Amazing. Maryrose Wood, it has been my absolute honor and pleasure.

 

Maryrose Wood: This has been wonderful. Thanks for having me on, Shelli.

 

[CLOSING]

 

Stu McLaren: I hope you love that story. It’s amazing, right? That’s what It’s a TRIBE Thing is all about. So many people in all kinds of niche markets are leveraging their existing knowledge and influence and they’re transforming it into passive monthly income. Listen, this isn’t luck. There’s a repeatable formula for producing a growing subscription income and each week we’re going behind the scenes to show you exactly how they did it. Get the latest stories and actionable ideas from each episode at www.ItsaTRIBEThing.com and if you know one other person who could benefit from this, tell them to subscribe. Tell them to go to ItsaTRIBEThing.com.

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