Chatted with a friend yesterday about my Substack post. She’s ramping up to a possible newsletter (nothing to be shared publicly yet, so no link). The evaluation of Patreon, Substack, Medium, Ghost, self-hosting/Wordpress, and other things are, in her estimation:
- Overwhelming
- Time consuming
- She just wants to start writing
- and worry about the business & technical stuff later
For №3 & 4 her concern, and a legit one, is having to move later due to a bad decision. Substack and Ghost are the current hotness, but it wasn’t that long ago that Medium was the place to be.
Before anyone asks, she is on-line savvy & has staked out her social media persona including a personal domain name. She had a blog for many years on Blogger and Wordpress.
Substack will likely be her choice because:
- The social elements are built in [sort of – pj] so less time needs to be devoted to Twitter, Bluesky, &c.
- Mailing list management is robust
- Good tech support
- Good money handling
She noted that she doesn’t like actually writing in Substack, or in fact any of the options. The best was Wordpress with the Classic Editor [naturally – pj]. She’ll keep using her own tools up until she publishes.
She disagreed with me that Substack isn’t that good for readers. It provides navigation on the side for longer pieces, for example. And there’s the note taking capabilities which she uses a lot. When I asked about getting one’s notes and data back out again she confessed to not having spent any time on that.
Food for thought.
