From Grathew's Desk
Hello All,
Been a busy few weeks. Filled with tech issues. That isn’t entire story on why this is late, but it is a good starting point.
Long story short I am moving the Gazette to a new platform, specially https://grathewgazette.com. I for one welcome the new url. For some this may seem like a sudden unexpected change. Where as in reality, I shouldn't have started on substack.
Substack is the home for newsletters, be that text, audio, or video. Frankly for that use case it is the best you can get.
I'm not just doing that. I am also doing a web serialized fiction, and a blog. The only proper newsletter part of the operation is this, my author to subscriber ramblings. Everything else isn’t really a newsletter being pushed into a newsletter format.
This has given me more than a bit of trouble on the back end. Couple that with a binary public/paid option and I've been looking for a new platform since December. It has been one of the background things that I’ve been shuffling though when I should be writing more. All in all I think the setup, once it’s finally set up. I have a few more pages and whatnot to set up over there. Should be set up by the end of the month. Ultimately the blog portion should be more bloggy, the website part should be better put together and everything should look better. I know it looks about the same, but that’s just the beginning.
That big piece of news out of the way on to the more expected stuff.
Noah Bannon dropped a new chapter Monday you can find it on Royal Road or the new site. I fixed up all of Royal Road’s version of the chapters to match the master document. I will be going though the versions on the new site and cleaning it up to make sure that everything is where it should be and whatnot.
Project Ghost (BTL:SG) is on it’s way. Should be done with the prologue and the first chapter soon. They will be going up at the end of March. I’m excited although I’m not going to share anything more than the acronym, not right now. I doubt any of you will be able to guess the full title. It’s a bit long, and very foreshadowing.
Worldbuild Wednesday got delayed a little bit, both parts will be out this week. I wanted both to go out on both platforms at the same time. Because of that I ended up delaying it. Thus a double feature on Ash Wednesday.
The second half of the Sci-Fam crossover will be out this Saturday. It too will be going out on the new site. What do you think of the merged concept? I’m thinking it may be something I do from time to time.
This is one of the features that drew me to Ghost.io. I can split the public post with the subscribers post. I can do a public bit and a subscriber bit. I can make posts wholly subscriber only which was something I was wanting to do in the first place. Thus next month a few things will become subscriber only. Fantasy-Friday and Sci-fi Saturday were supposed to be extra subscriber only content. Now they will be.
Which reminds me, Thank You for subscribing. I know a lot of creators say it. But the fact you're willing to subscribe means a lot.
Another one of the changes you will see is a link to my Ko-fi at the end of every one of my public articles, at the moment think Worldbuild Wednesday. You subscribers are subscribed. Frankly that means more to me than any amount of monetary compensation. While Ghost.io can do monetized blogs and the likes it costs money. Which reminds me the reason why I ended up on Ghost.io, I didn't want to badmouth Substack too much on Substack and the public post is a 1:1 copy from Substack.
Beyond what I mentioned above Substack really wants people to monetize early and aggressively. Things like having a free backlog isn't want Substack wants. As Substack takes ~10% of every subscription, the more subscribers paying you the more they make. However they don't really care if you make subscriptions thus they don't turn that 'I want to be monetized' into growth. As my strategy is pay for early access it's counter to what Substack wants me to do and that really rubbed me the wrong way.
Ghost.io I have to pay to use as a creator. Meaning they don't really care what it is I do, and in fact if I want to monetize on their platform I need to pay them more. A coast I think will be worth it do to the more powerful system. Meaning I can do a cheap, get the fiction early tier, a middling get everything early tier, and a expensive get access to previews to physical books and news from my writer friends, heads up on who I'm interviewing, you know the full back stage access kind of thing. No idea on when that will happen. As a reminder on Substack its paid/public. Which means none of that plan works, and that the paid tier was the most expensive tier. Now I don't know what the price will be, will need to get head to keyboard and figure out what exactly will go where and what not.
At the moment I don't know when I'll go to that paid tiered system. If I can manage a discount code for existing subscribers I will. Because quite frankly I'm glad you guys are here before it was cool. As we are on the topic you will see the Ko-fi tip jar appended to the end of my articles, I spun it up for Royal Road and am now going to use it here until I get the numbers of people asking for the full subscription.
I will be doing a test subscriber notification article with a Worldbuild Wednesday: Addendum I have some thoughts about romance and signaling that should be taken into account when worldbuilding, and honestly call people to go out and do it as well. Because I think we need to start reviving a way to signal intent and availability that removes some of the landmines of modernity. Those will be subscriber only, however this topic I think is so important it will go out to the world, it will probably be sometime next week or early March. Depends on when I get what written.
Lastly I do think this platform will be better for not only myself but those of you who want to tag along with me much better long term. Almost everything on my end is better, and I have a lot more sections I can use. I have things from callouts, to galleries, to drop downs. Most of it will need experimentation. Thus I ask you, be loud. Let me know what you think, and if there's anything you'd like to see added to the subscriber tier of content. Now that I know I can do that I'm way more interested in seeing what I can do to give back to those of you who subscribed to me.
See you all Wednesday,
Grathew
