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The Blogging / Mailing List Conundrum

The number one thing people have been asking of me for years now is an actual regular newsletter. And I always demurred because I used to blog So Often (in The Before Times, I used to blog five times a week across my two different blogs, and that was WAY too much, no one should blog that much) and wasn’t that basically just like a newsletter?

And then, of course, I suffer from “but I don’t want to bother people!” syndrome where I have Catholic guilt every time I send out an email blast… even though you’re all people who specifically signed up to hear from me.

This put me into a chicken and egg situation where I couldn’t figure out how to serve those two masters: people who wanted regular updates and writing articles from me and people who just wanted the headlines only (new writing classes, book release, sales, etc).

Should I send out a newsletter weekly? Monthly? Only as-needed? As I waffled back and forth between which way to lean, I simply posted nothing for a long while because I got in my head about it.

I miss blogging.

I miss chatting with you all.

Most importantly, I LIKE sharing writing articles and craft tips and I hated I no longer had a good way to do it.

I needed to find an option that worked for everyone.

Welcome to the hybrid solution!

I never really liked Brevo so I’m ditching it. I’ve already got a space here that I control fully and I already mention everything newsworthy on the blog anyway, why not simplify my life and consolidate!

Blog? Newsletter? What am I looking at here?

Both! WordPress now has the capacity to serve as a Substack-like mailing list so I’ve just decided that we’ll merge the two.

This is my blog.

It’s now also my newsletter.

Beyond keeping everything in-house and only having to update one location (easier for me!), what I love the most about this is that Jetpack gives you, the reader, total control over your subscription!

• Choose how you get posts! Get posts via email, the WordPress app where you already read your other subscribed blogs or just log into the website and read in your browser when you see me mention something that looks interesting on social media. Choices! As long as you’re signed up as a subscriber, you can choose how you read updates instead of being stuck with email as your only option.
• Choose whether you get emails as they happen or digested weekly or monthly. This is my favorite feature of all because it’s the solution to my email frequency dilemma! I don’t have to worry about sending too many emails because YOU, dear reader are in control of how often you get posts. So I can frolic as chaotically as I wish across the blog and post whenever I want and you can decide whether you want to get posts live as-they-happen or digested later to fit your schedule. So the people who only want a monthly newsletter get their monthly newsletter and I don’t have to overthink whether I’m posting too often.

This also gives me the flexibility to still update the blog regularly, but also nest subscriber only content in the middle of posts for everyone. The best of both words! There will also be subscriber only posts where I can talk a little bit more about the behind the scenes type stuff I don’t necessarily want to broadcast to everyone.

And, of course, it’s WAY easier for us to have conversation since the comment section is already built right in!

Frequency

While I would ultimately like to promise a regular update schedule, right now I’m just aiming for at least one proper article up monthly and then we’ll see where we got from there.

Yes, Free!

Right now, the subscriber method is just so I can make certain content exclusive to my most devoted readers without having to worry about it going out to everyone or being scraped for AI training. I have no plans to charge or monetize anything yet and– even if I do– I will still always offer a free option.

We’ll figure it out together

I expect there will be a bit of a learning curve as I figure out what works best because I’m used to blogging one way and doing mailing list posts another and now I have to merge the two but I, for one, am excited about the possibilities this opens up!

(And also, don’t worry, they won’t all be this long! I just had a lot of business to cover for the first edition!)

As part of this new process, I’ll be starting a few different blog series that we’ll cycle between from week to week. Some of the ones I’ve got planned are…

• The Next Write Thing: tips for writing in a world gone mad
• What Works For Me: Strategies I’ve implemented in my writing life I want to share in case you find them helpful too!
• Get It Writ: Join me as I test out major productivity methods and see how they could apply to writing
• Behind the Scenes: Backstage candid stuff about the writing world that I don’t necessarily want to share with the entire internet
• Tools of the Trade: In dept reviews of writing services and software
• …and then update posts that are more of your typical newsletter-y content at least quarterly just so you know what I’m up to!

To that end, here’s more of a personal update to what’s been happening with me:

What I’ve been up to…

Bookkeeping logistics nightmare. WaveApps is changing their payment structure on June 1st and taking away automatic bank transaction import for free accounts. Since both my companies use them for bookkeeping / invoicing and paying double for a service that didn’t really serve my needs was NOT desirable, I lost a whole day of writing to trying to find a solution. After trying ZipBooks, ZohoBooks and GnuCash (all of which had their strengths, but none of which could do automatic imports from both PayPal and Chase Bank like I needed), I finally found a simple solution in the combo of BanktoSheets (which is a mere $5 a month for up to five bank connections aka FAR cheaper than paying for two accounts on Wave/Zip/Zoho/et al) and the free Wave Connect plugin for Google Sheets.

So if anyone else is going through that same struggle, hopefully knowing about those options upfront will save you some time!

What even is comfort, really? Long term readers will remember I have joint issues and I’ve been going through the arduous process of trying to upgrade my writing set-up to be more ergonomic. Changing so many things at once is mostly making me feel like I am losing my mind trying to figure out if this way is better, worse, or if I have never actually experienced comfort in my life.

At some point, I’d like to do a big breakdown of everything I discovered during this process and exactly what I ended up with, but I’m going to live with this current set up for a while and make sure this actually works long term before I do. If you had asked me 48 hours ago, I would have told you my current set up was perfect… except today my wrist is randomly hurting and I’m just sitting here like whyyyy which part of this is the problem when will I know peace??

I’ve been cheating on you. So there is an elephant in the room we might as well address right up front: I have started a few secret pen names that I am not going to share on here. The why is very simple: branding and the fact that most of what I write under my real name is either all ages or skews young and people get cranky if perceived “kids” authors write something a little more adult. No, it shouldn’t be like that but, yeah, it still is.

Someday I might just put that writing side by side on this site but, for now, I need to keep those disconnected.

This has left me in a weird situation, though, because one of the things I always used to do on this blog was be completely transparent about my writing process and how my various drafts were going and, if I’m going to keep doing that, I’m going to have to become vague about exactly what I’m working on. Suffice it to say I AM still writing at the usual ludicrous volume, have lots of extremely cool stuff in various states of completion, but (for the foreseeable future anyway) you’ll have the somewhat jarring experience of me talking about all these novels I am clearly writing while it looks like I have nothing to show for it on this blog specifically.

Blog clean up in progress! As part of making this switch from just a blog to blog and newsletter both, I’m doing a big clean up of old posts. This blog is actually a horrifying Frankenstein of my old Geocities, Tripod/Lycos AND Blogger blogs all smashed together and a big clean up of old posts is FAR overdue. (Don’t worry, I kept an archive of everything! It will just live offline.) As part of this, I may shamelessly clean up some of my older post and repost them new because there’s a lot of good content buried in my back catalog and it’s really hard to find right now.

Tho I’m STILL trying to find a solution for posting series that I like…

In Progress

• Publication for The Raven / Lenore which I’m excited to get out there since it’s fast becoming one of my most requested short plays
• The next How to Start Writing book. Now that Make Ready to Write is finally getting out the door, it’s time to look ahead! My original plan was to focus next on the editing book (which will replace NaNo Now What, more on that in a future post!), but I think it might make more sense to make the writing productivity book #3 since that fits the flow of the series better. Either way, both of those are close to ready to roll and so my hope is to have the next two books in that series out soon.
• Multiple very cool novels in various states of completion I can talk about sorry because they are for my secret penname, but arghhh they are so good, I can’t wait for people to read them!

Feel free to leave a comment on this post to let me know which one you’d be the most interested in seeing!

Oh and if you’re just viewing this on the blog or came from social media and want to make sure you can always see subscriber only content in the future, you can sign up for a free account below!