This recipe will upgrade new members of a certain membership level to authors and then also downgrade them to subscribers if they cancel or change membership. Make sure that the id checked is the same as the id of the membership level you want to upgrade to authors. If you have several membership levels that should be upgraded to authors, make sure you update the conditional check appropriately.
And here is a gist as an example for how to handle multiple roles and custom roles.
Adding the recipe to your website
You can add this recipe to your site by creating a custom plugin or using the Code Snippets plugin available for free in the WordPress repository. Read this companion article for step-by-step directions on either method.
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