And there are cats!

Gwen Cooper is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoirs Homer’s Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned About Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat and Homer: The Ninth Life of a Blind Wonder Cat, as well as the novel Love Saves the Day, narrated from a cat’s point of view. Her latest offering is the monthly Curl Up with a Cat Tale e-story series, an innovative first-of-its-kind venture that’s a hybrid of traditional and self-publishing models. Recently, WPNews caught up with Gwen to learn more.
Tell us more about Curl Up with a Cat Tale. How does it work?
Curl Up with a Cat Tale is a short-story series (each tale is roughly 8,000 to 10,000 words) with a new, cat-centric story published the first week of each month. It’s ebook only, and readers can buy each story individually through Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and so on for $3.99 apiece, or they can subscribe to the series directly through my website and make a one-time payment of $14.99 (60% off the retail price) and get all 10 stories in the 2018/2019 series.
Stories are available to subscribers through my website in ePub, Mobi, and PDF formats, which allows people to read the tales on any computer, device, or ereading app—or they can print the stories out on paper if they’d prefer a hard copy.
Curl Up launched with beta testing in April and then a full launch in May, so if someone subscribes in July or August (for example), they immediately get every story published to date, and then starting the following month they get one new story the first week of each month through April 2019. Subscriptions will automatically renew in April 2019 unless a subscriber opts out or unsubscribes, which of course readers are free to do at any time, and it’s super simple for them to do so!
How are new stories distributed to subscribers?
When readers subscribe through my website, they create a username and password. They can login to my site with those credentials at any time and download all available stories whenever they wish.
I send an email to subscribers when a new story is published during the first week of the month, just to give them a heads-up. About 75% of them come over as soon as they get that email from me, and the other 25% poke around the site whenever they feel like it.
This sounds like something you could have indie-published, yet we hear you’re working with a traditional publisher. Why did you decide to go that route?
Originally I was planning to self-publish, primarily because I didn’t think a traditional publisher would go for this idea. But then my agent connected me with BenBella Books, a young and innovative independent publisher. And, in addition to the entire team at BenBella being such amazing rock stars (truly one of the greatest work experiences I’ve ever had), I love having the flexibility of doing something like this while also having all the institutional resources—editorial and creative support, for example—that a traditional publisher can offer. They also take care of distribution and promotion through Kindle, Nook, iBooks, Kobo, GooglePlay, and all the rest, which frees up more of my time to focus on writing and on managing and promoting the subscription program.
I built the subscription interface and database on my website and manage that along with customer-service issues (which, thanks to a super-transparent system, have been very few!). It’s a pretty even split in terms of shared responsibility, and our revenue split reflects that.
Best of all, BenBella will publish a print collection based on the series, called My Life in a Cat House, available in bookstores at the end of the year. Some of the stories in the subscription series won’t end up in the book, and some of the stories in the book won’t be in the subscription series—so there’s something for everyone, regardless of their preferred format, and a reason for subscribers to also get the print edition for themselves or as gifts. A very large percentage of my readers report buying additional copies of my books for cat-loving friends and relatives, and I wanted to make sure they’d still be able to do that.
All Curl Up with a Cat Tale subscribers, by the way, will receive a special discount coupon toward purchase of My Life in a Cat House, courtesy of BenBella. I love those guys!
What has reader response been like so far?
We got just over 1,000 subscriber sign-ups through my website (not including individual story sales on Kindle, Nook, iBooks, etc.) during the first month of launch. I haven’t done much in the way of promotion yet, beyond reaching out to my email database, and a handful of social media posts. So I’ve been very pleased with the response so far!
Now that I’ve finally gotten all of my 2018 stories for the series banked with my publisher, I plan to go full-throttle into marketing mode.
Why did you decide to try a monthly short-story series rather than just collecting the tales in a traditional book and publishing them all at once?
The first reason came down to social media, and how quickly things move online. After the success of Homer’s Odyssey, my cat, Homer. developed a huge social media following—close to a million followers across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter combined. Which is great! By the same token, as a writer I obviously can’t put out new content as quickly as an Instagrammer posting new pictures every day, or a YouTuber posting new videos every week. So I wanted to create some immediacy for our audience—a sense that they’re keeping up with our day-to-day lives—without straying too far from my writing roots.
I also like knowing that I have greater direct access to my readers. You can never really control how many people Facebook or Twitter will show your posts to, or how much shelf space you’ll get in a bookstore, or whether an email provider will suddenly start shunting your database newsletters into a “Promotions” folder that most people don’t even check. I’ve been very lucky in terms of my support from booksellers and social media platforms, and I could never in a million years do what I do without them! But I do sleep better knowing that there’s this little slice of my work that’s all about direct, unfiltered contact between my readers and me.
I also sleep better knowing that most of this year’s subscribers will auto-renew next year!
And because subscriptions are managed through my own website, I’m able to get a lot more insight into my readership than is usually available to authors. I know, for example, the extent to which my readers skew male versus female, geographic areas where they tend to be more highly concentrated, how many of them read each new story as soon it comes out versus those who wait until there are a bunch and then binge-read them—things like that.
How do you plan to promote the series to attract new subscribers?
Pretty much the same way I promote traditional books—PR outreach, social media (the outlets I’ve already mentioned, along with Goodreads, Amazon, and so on), continued direct-mail outreach to my database, small events at animal shelters and bookstores along with speaking appearances at larger events like Catfest in London and CatCon in LA, and working with some of the other social media influencers in the cat world with whom I’ve developed relationships over the years.
What are the stories in the series like? Are they fiction or nonfiction?
Homer was, naturally, the primary focus of Homer’s Odyssey, so the series includes him, but also spotlights my other four cats, who attracted a lot of fans in their own right through the books about Homer.
The stories are all true and first-person—I guess mini-memoirs might be the best way to describe them. They’re in the same vein as Homer’s Odyssey, so they have a lot of humor and heart. I’m very much influenced by writers like Nora Ephron and Irma Bombeck (I remember all the moms reading her when I was little), although because I write for a pet-loving audience, there’s a pretty wide streak of “aww” mixed in with the comedy.
Last but not least, how can our readers learn more about Curl Up with a Cat Tale or sign up themselves?
Easily! Just go to www.gwencooper.com/cat-tales or email me directly through the contact form on my website. I love hearing from readers and other writers!