Hello Everyone!
It's a New Year, and that means it's a good chance to change some things up!
TL;DR Buymeacoffee decided to remove a lot of stuff that makes continuing on the platform untenable. I'm moving this to Substack as a result. I'll operate my Substack just like here with free stories and articles, with the option to support. I'll continue to post the same material on both, but Substack will be my focus going forward. Check out the link to the Substack below!
At the top of my list is moving away from this site, Buymeacoffee.com. I am sure you may be wondering why. Well, the truth is I've thought about putting this project on Substack almost since I made this site. But at the time, Buymeacoffee had relatively similar features and tools that allowed me to track traffic and how posts were doing, so I decided that rather than divide my efforts between multiple platforms, I'd just focus here.
However, Buymeacoffee started to lose those metrics, meaning that, now, I have no idea how many views each post is getting, regardless of overall traffic. I'm sure you can understand, from an administrative standpoint, how this could be a problem. How am I supposed understand if my posts are getting exposure where I advertise, or where to spend my time promoting, if I have no idea if something has even been viewed a single time to begin with.
I honestly can't imagine why removing view and traffic data from any online platform would even begin to make sense. Understanding the traffic coming to your website is one of the most basic and vital metrics. You literally can't contextualize any other data point without it. In fact, the only metric Buymeacoffee.com provides now is how much your site is making. While that's good to know, how am I supposed to judge success when I don't know if anyone is even looking to begin with. It makes absolutely zero sense.
So, what does that mean for this site? Honestly, I'm going to keep posting here, unless everyone moves over to Substack, because I don't want to inconvenience you because the website decided to counterintuitively make it disadvantageous to work here. So, you will still get the same stories, articles, and all that I'll be putting on Substack if you'd rather read and keep up with my work here. But, my main focus will be over there.
There will be no change in frequency of posts, or how much I put out for free. This is just a straight up move, but otherwise business as usual. Thankfully with Substack, there's a lot more options for you as a reader, like you can customize your notifications so that you only get updates about Shattered Wings, and things like that. I've already gone back and imported nearly the entire archive of posts and articles here on Buymeacoffee over to the Substack so nothing important is missing. The only things I didn't port over were old updates about schedule changes, or obsolete copies of things that have been redone later. Definitely check it out!
My first new post on the Substack will come tomorrow, as well as the newest issue of The Bones of Night will come this Sunday.
Here is the link to the Substack! I hope to see you there!