ModFarm Update

Just as we’ve had to take a look at Hosting and eCommerce, we need to take a similarly hard look at Support and make come changes to bring our support policy to a sustainable and balanced position.

As always, our purpose is to provide the best, most affordable, and most effective solutions to our authors. Looking at how support has been requested and used over the last two years, we feel this is the best way to meet everyone’s needs.

First, some quick history…

The other original intent for ModFarm was to make it fully supported. Original members signed up for two subscriptions: $25/mo for hosting and $25/mo for support. I really had no idea what support would cost, to be honest, but my thought process was if everyone signed up for it then even larger jobs would even out in the long run. Not everyone needs support all the time. Kind of like insurance, I guess. We wanted every site to be current and active, and ThirdScribe had taught us that authors were, by and large, not that willing to keep their sites updated with their latest release – a universal support subscription fee seemed to address that and all were happy.

Eventually, budgets got a little tighter and more and more clients asked to be DIY or, at the least, a’la carte. We tried it on an experimental basis – and it worked out OK. There were some invoicing issues we struggled with at the beginning, but those were resolved and now it’s working pretty smoothly. Considering we now have significantly more ala Carte Support vs Concierge Support, I’d say it’s become the new standard.

Which brings us to today.

One thing we didn’t account for with ala Carte Support was the degrading balance between DIY users, Support Users, and the cost deficit that created. Whether we want to call it cost distribution, cost sharing, or digital socialism, the reality is the support pricing was based on everyone paying for support – and now only one third of users do. But, that one third, largely, uses 90% of all support. And, in reality, it is one third of that one third.

Once you step back and look at it, it becomes pretty obvious that this can’t continue long term.

As a result, the Modfarm Support Policy is getting updated to account for the actual reality of what our members need in terms of support for their websites.

Book and product entry has gotten much more involved than the early days. Not only are page designs more complex, requiring more image prep work, but linking has become much more dynamic and, with preorders, audiobooks, and online stores, a book page often requires multiple revisions.

To compensate for that, just as we have with hosting, we’ve been working and testing a way to get everyone the support they need at the most effective price. We’ve updated our support pricing and that will be going into effect with the ModFarm 3.0 rollout.

What are these changes we’re talking about?

In essence, our members fall into two main categories. Those who need regular, consistent support on their sites and those who don’t. When I say “regular consistent support” I’m referring to weekly book ads (some multiple per week) and/or multiple times a month scheduled small tasks (newsletter formatting, store updates, landing page builds, etc). Inconsistent members are much more along the lines of adding a book a couple times a year, maybe a small change in addition to that.

These are very different camps, and in each one there are still “power” users. Some clients add 10, even 20, books a month. Some don’t publish often, but when they do it is with a significant, multi-week launch plan. And some quietly add a new book two to three times a year. It’s a very wide support range to accommodate.

To meet this need, Support is now broken out into three options: a Support Subscription, a’la Carte Support, and Custom Support.

We’re keeping the Support Subscription, but the price has increased to meet the most common use case. The standard support subscription is now set at $45/mo and this support level provides a means for what we originally envisioned and is the most common among active Support users: a couple of book or product adds a month and maybe a light change or two – format a blog post, help with a newsletter kind of thing. While we remain flexible and accommodating with any subscriber, this is not unlimited support, so if a member goes beyond the scope (say, you add a bunch of translations at one go), the balance of work will be charged a’la Carte.

We’ve also really opened up, and encourage, a’la Carte Support, where we have dedicated unit pricing and fast invoicing for most standard things. $12.50 to add book, $10 for a product, $20 a task. If you write and send your own newsletters and blog posts and just want a little help now and then, this is the best way to go. Clients can even give ModFarm standing support orders and we’ll monitor your listings online, take the directed action, and invoice when it’s done. We think this is the most cost effective and flexible support option and puts the control in the author or publisher’s hand.

Finally, we have Custom Support levels. We have a few clients that have very active sites that require significantly more effort and upkeep than the average. For these clients we’ll track their usage ala carte, find an average spend, and work with them to develop a cost effective support plan to simplify billing.

Here are some scenarios to help illustrate how this will work

1. Monthly Support Subscription. The author signs up for monthly standard support for $45/mo. Each week they add either a book or a product to their website, with no other actions. Time goes by and one month they ask for some help to promote their Patreon on the home page – no problem, we got you. A few months later, they want to add a full series they had translated to German – 6 books, on top of the usual 4. The four books will be added as usual, and the 6 translated books are invoiced for $12.50 each to enter and build those pages.

2. Ala Carte Support. An author requests ala carte support with a standing order to add a book to their site when it goes on preorder to Amazon, but permission first for any anthologies. Each month ModFarm support checks their Amazon listing, and when a new book is found, it’s added to the site and the client is sent an invoice. Couple of months go by and nothing new is added, nothing is charged, all are happy. Then, the next month two books go up for preorder and also an anthology is published which the author is attached to. We enter the two books, ask the client for direction on the anthology, and invoice for work accomplished.

3. Ala Carte Support, take 2. An author with ala carte support requests a book be added. We do so and invoice. Two months later, the book comes out on audio and the author lets us know – no worries, we got you. We add in the audio component, no charge (audio updates are included in the original $12.50).

4. Ala Carte Support, take 3. An author publishes a couple of times a year and communicates in advance their launch plan. Part of the launch plan is to have preorders through their existing online store, build a custom list from those sales to a newsletter, have a custom newsletter auto-sequence for that preorder, add a book page for the new book, and create a custom landing page. On completion, the client would be invoiced $12.50 for the book page, $10 for the product page, a $20 small task to arrange the newsletter and sequence and a $20 small task for the landing page.

5. Custom Support. A publisher publishes, on average, two books a week. They want book pages added, the home page updated, index pages updated, a blog post formatted and posted, and a newsletter formatted and sent out each Thursday. This happens every week, with the publisher sending text and images. A custom support plan is developed and agreed to. One week, three books are added instead of two – no problem, we got you. Another month the publisher decides to add an online store, with 15 products to start, and adding two products a week to the store after that. The extra work for setting up and populating the store is priced separately and invoiced, and then the support plan is updated for the additional work moving forward.

How Does Doing This Help?

The purpose of this change is to align support costs to the individual author or publisher in the way most appropriate to them. In a majority of cases, this will result in a reduction in monthly/annual costs. For a small number of members, there will be an increase in cost.

The overall effect will be an increased support response time from ModFarm with an overall reduction in cost. In effect, it puts more emphasis on ModFarm to be active in support while author will only pay for the support they actually need and use, at the time that they use it.

When Will This Take Effect?

When your site is upgraded to ModFarm 3.0, we’ll confirm your support needs and what support option you prefer.

In Summer 2021, we started building sites with our own custom ModFarm Author Theme which was a leap forward for author site development, giving us much easier ability to customize site fonts, colors, navigation, and increased our page design options.

Summer of 2022 was the first evolution of the ModFarm Book Management System (BMS), with later theme and BMS development rolling out in Spring 2023. We called this ModFarm 2.5 and it came with a lot of improvements in Book Page layout, cover art, sales links, button control, and a lot more. It was a big update, but didn’t get us quite all the way.

Now here we are, November 2023, and we are finally ready to put out ModFarm 3.0, the most comprehensive change to our author website system to date. It hits a lot of issues that have been sticking points for a while now and brings out some capabilities that many have been requesting and waiting for.

We’re talking translations, audiobooks, ecommerce, page layouts, and more. It’s a lot of stuff.

First, I’ll go through what we’ve done and then how we’re going to roll it out to all members.

The Boring Stuff

Three new book taxonomies were created. Joining book series, book author, and book tag, we’ve now added book genre, book format, and book translations.

We also added more options for book cover art. Previously, book pages only had one option: Featured Image. Now, we can upload and access dedicated options for flat art, audiobook, 3d mockup, and composite.

Two new book page templates – blocks and full-header blocks – are now available, in addition to the original “single book page.” No code or extra plugins needed, everything built right there on the page.

And, finally, we added a LOT of book meta fields. Previously, there was not much linking for books built in, only the 6 buttons. Well, not any more. There are now 29 available external links, including retailers like Amazon, Kindle, Audible, iBooks, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Waterstones, etc, etc. There are deciated fields for link to reviews, link to sample, link to series. We’ve added meta fields for illustrators (for comics/graphic novels), translators, and cover artists. Even links to buy direct – ebook, audiobook, paperback, hardcover, and signed copies. And each of those fields can be called from and dropped into places all across the site.

There have also been a plethora of smaller changes to styling/CSS, meta-data, and some other behind the scenes functionality that comes up from time to time.

Which brings us to hosting level infrastructure upgrades (yawn, I know).

Details about the new hosting pricing plans are available over here. I’m gonna talk about what’s actually different technically.

• Image size reduction has been improved by 400% – faster delivery, no quality reduction.
• Upgrades to security
• Improvements to code asset delivery
• More Store/eCommerce integrations
• Domain Names – that’s right, we can obtain and manage them for you. You can even transfer them over to us to manage – not just nameservers, I mean the whole thing.
• Google Analytics – if you don’t have your own GA account, we’ll get it and connect it for you.
• ReCaptcha 3 – better, faster, lighter

For the ModFarm Newsletter user:

• Improved custom form design
• Improved segmenting by Tag/Field
• Improved subscription automations
• Improved retargeting, including automated retargeting
• Infinite Lists (previously limited to 40, which is a lot, but you know…)
• Improved eCommerce integration

This boring sounding stuff provides the groundwork to a lot of the more exciting stuff.

The Cool Stuff

With the ground work in place, we added functions to pull all that itemized information in some pretty exciting ways.

First and foremost is the ability to completely customize the book page. Book elements can be placed anywhere and in any combination. Want to go wide? Sure thing. Kindle Direct? You got it. Want your onsite store links to be first, then outside links? Not a problem. Some buttons over here, some other there? Yup, easy day. This combines to create a unique looking and uniquely functional site.

Second, is a series of custom blocks that allow for access to all book page information, letting sites pull out and distribute book information in ways that were impossible before.

Format specific listings, especially audiobook listings, are now possible. We created the multi-taxonomy block that allows us to sort books by format and any other taxonomy. For example, for a publisher’s author pages, we want to show both the author’s available books and audiobooks. And those audiobooks should look like audiobooks – square covers, maybe also the audio sample and the narrator. Previously, to do this was a intensely manual effort that required constant reworking and updating. Now, it’s just a couple clicks and that’s it.

Want a second set of index pages just for audio books, ordered by series, also with square covers, samples, and links direct to Audible instead of the book page? Or maybe to your site’s direct-buy store? Well, now you can.

Box sets, special edition hardcovers, books available with signed copies – all easily identified, sorted, and accessed

With the new blocks accessing a book’s expanded foundational information, authors can now embed books anywhere on their site, however they want, in whatever format, dynamic or static. No code, no customization – just select your options.

Translations and dedicated translation patterns. A side benefit of the expansion in book page layouts is the ability to add multiple custom Book Page patterns. For those with translations, we can rapidly apply page layouts customized for language, taking advantage of translated buttons, custom store links, specific mailing lists, and more.

Also, a lot more pre-made page, blog, and application patterns: linktree style pages, book inserts, locked content, also-boughts, recommended books, book reviews, media kits, book releases, press announcements, and more.

The Secretly Cool Stuff

We’ve covered the groundwork stuff, and the flashy stuff, but what about the under-the-hood marketing stuff?

To start with, site analytics gathering has been significantly expanded due to a dramatic revision in our application of Google Analytics. Darn near everything has an analytics tag in it. If someone is clicking on something book related, we want to know about it.

Why is this cool and important?

ModFarm author sites are a lot more effective than the standard website, with conversion rates higher than Amazon (really). This is achieved by ruthlessly watching metrics and arranging page designs that convince visitors to take specific actions.

But, over the last two years – and definitely the last year – we’ve been seeing site visitor trends that I would like to get a lot more insight into. Specifically with larger Index and Series pages – which now includes individual even book pages, as the new 3.0 system allows for much more book embedment in those pages – Complete Series, You Might Like, Also By Author – kind of things. How much are they clicked? How does it affect site conversion? How large an index is too large?

What about alternative page layouts? Are some more effective than others?

Turning your author website into a beautiful and highly effective marketing machine is our primary goal. And advanced metrics help us achieve that.

The Deployment Process

First, I’ll push out the new code to every site. Not much will change right off the bat. But, over time, as your site’s content is updated, we’ll take the opportunity to bring in more information and start flushing things out.

For example, a new book is added to a series. We’ll likely take that time to add in all of the audiobook covers for that series, and maybe another one.

It will be that kind of process – first we upgrade the capability for each site, then we’ll go back and make changes slowly.

Good news is this has already started, with more than half of our sites updated to the new framework.

What’s coming next?

A few more things we’re working on:

Always on, always updated Book Series Indexes – because sometimes that is really hard to keep up with. It allows each Book Series to be broken out by genre/subgenre and then listed and linked using the title and the first book cover in the series. Whenever a series is added, it’s instantly updated. Set to be alphabetical by title and will auto-index itself. Clients with larger bibliographies know how handy something like this can be.

Deluxe Single Book placement. Similar to the Multi-Tax block, but this one will be for single embedment. We use the “Simple Book CTA” a lot, and I think the ability to be able to add in format variations and meta to those embeds will be even more handy.

Both of these should be ready late 2023 early 2024. I’m really close, just need a week or two of uninterrupted development time to polish them off.

The next big development track is to make our themes fully “blocked” with the ability to create custom page templates for anything – including index pages (the only thing we can’t do at this time). That requires a lot of change and will be our transition away from the Genesis platform, which is a really big deal. That will probably take a majority of 2024

Thank you for being a ModFarm member. We love taking care of you, your readers, and your sites.

It’s time to talk seriously about ecommerce, author websites, and ModFarm. Because it’s starting to get real 😉

For years now, Amazon has been the key marketplace, with 99% of our authors (and probably all authors) selling books on Amazon. For those who are “wide” there is trickle down to other stores, but the primary seller remains Amazon. Enter Kindle Unlimited, and that became even more so. Website stores were mainly for signed copies and POD merch, maybe a few collector or special run items.

Then things started to change. Some genres, and even authors, have seen their books delisted or no longer promoted by the Amazon algorithm. Some authors have been taken off other platforms, such as Patreon. And, KU page reads have started going down in some genres, changing the economics of exclusivity.

This has opened up some experimentation into subscription memberships and direct sales. And some of those experiments have gotten to be quite large.

In the past two months, ModFarm has opened more stores and ecommerce services than in the last two years. And we’ve gone from a couple of items to hundreds of items per store. We have two major subscription services – almost their own KU or Audible Membership – with more considering it.

As a result of this, we’re looking to invest in eCommerce for our sites in a significant way, with the stated intent to make them a rival to third party commerce solutions/services such as Shopify, Patreon, and SubStack. This includes features such as up-selling, cross-selling, advanced variations, bundling, advanced discounts, subscriptions and memberships, reports, taxes, shipping, and more.

This includes not only the plugins we use, but also the way we go about building and structuring stores.

In addition, our ModFarm Newsletter system integrates directly with a site’s ecommerce, allowing us to add customers to targeted lists, automated sequences, and advanced and automated retargeting. And, as always, books and products can be directly inserted into those newsletters, allowing for follow ups, up- and cross-sells, pre-orders, and more.

Also, with our new ModFarm 3 infrastructure (currently rolling out to all sites), we can integrate store items into book pages in multiple ways, from direct “add to cart action” buttons to actually embedding related products.

With this additional capability does come some additional cost, but we’ve taken every step to keep this very affordable, especially when compared to our competition.

Here’s how that brakes down:

Patreon – 5% per transaction
Substack – 10% per transaction
Shopify – $39/mo (Basic Plan)
ModFarm – $50/year

ModFarm does not take any percentage of sale – subscription or otherwise. Never have and never will. We provide the site and the necessary functions to make it work, that’s it. The $50/year is for maintenance and the various plug-in licenses to expand WooCommerce’s basic capabilities.

What about adding new products? Our standard rates apply, which is $10/product listing (up to 3 variations per product). Our members can always add their own (and many do), but if you want ModFarm to do it, standard pricing applies. If you have a support subscription, product adds will be covered to the limit of the subscription (same as with books), which equates to a maximum of 4 product pages a month under the standard support rate. We’ve expanded on our support policy, so might want to give that a review over here.

As author focused ecommerce continues to evolve, we’ll likely make some adjustments, adding capability, refining processes and the like. But, we do see on site ecommerce as a viable income stream for authors and publishers moving forward and we are committed to supporting it.

How will this roll out?

For all existing stores on ModFarm sites, the $50 annual fee will start when your site is transitioned over to the new ModFarm 3.0 infrastructure. As part of that upgrade, we will review with each author how they want their store to work with the new capabilities, make those changes, and billing will follow after that.

Moving forward, for new sites with stores or new stores on existing sites, the annual charge will start once that store is set up and live.