write your name in lightning; shame the sky

Was reading a fic and laughed out loud at it.

Am delighting myself writing Dollshops & Deathmages. I'm halfway done and happy with how it's shaping up.

Had an excellent peach kombucha to drink.

Have the house to myself for a glorious while, because my relatives are travelling.

Am enjoying a k-drama tremendously. Undercover Miss Hong. It's halfway aired, let's hope the rest of it is just as good. (You know those silly Hollywood action movies where there's a guy doing some kind of secret operation, and women who are in the narrative all have crushes on him, and he's too busy doing Important Stuff to notice? Imagine if it was the heroine doing stuff too Secret and Important to pay much mind to the men growing feelings for her, and you have Undercover Miss Hong. Trust k-drama to make something assuming *I* am watching the way other media industries make things assuming men are watching. And it features strong female friendships!)

Three out of the five things I have put down here are related to stories. 역시, whenever I'm happy, stories are usually at the heart of my happiness.

I'm participating in a cozy fantasy anthology with several other cozy fantasy authors from the FaRo discord. It's kept me writing throughout the whole rigmarole with Amazon and Wise, and since the deadline is approaching, I'm prioritising it over drafting the rest of Project Fang/Bloodhunt Academy. My contribution to the anthology is titled Dollshops & Deathmages. If it sounds spooky-cute, it sounds about right!

My colleagues at the FaRo discord are also helping me figure out how to get Amazon to behave. They say going wide is a separate matter. That I shouldn't have to have a distributor like D2D take a cut from my Amazon royalties if I can help it, since I'm already facing Amazon's retailer cut and Wise's conversion+payment processing cut. Most wide authors go direct to the big retailers like Amazon and Kobo because the bulk of their income is made there and you don't want more cuts on that income than you can help. They use D2D to distribute to Smashwords, libraries and smaller retailers, when uploading directly to another platform is more trouble than it's worth.

I do think this experience has put me off KU. I initially decided on KU after I was laid off, and that decision made me feel less insecure at the time. Not anymore, though. Now I feel more insecure putting my eggs in one basket because the basket has flaws. Guess I'm going wide, although I've yet to plan exactly what that will look like.

In other news, I tried out Fika as an alternative to Substack for my author newsletter. So far it's promising but lacking in some features I can't do without. I have less than a 100 subscribers now, but once the cozy fantasy anthology launches, it's going to be used as a newsletter magnet and I'll have to keep signups more organised. Fika doesn't show you which of your subscribers do and don't open your emails, nor does it show you how many opens a specific newsletter you sent out got (only your overall open rate). That won't help me trim inactive subcribers, and it's kind of important to do that so email services know I'm not spam. The technical term is sender's reputation. Substack shows me individual subscriber opens and clicks, plus stats per post, which will become necessary once I have a load of signups from people who wanted the anthology but don't necessarily want to stick around for news of what I'm writing next.

Last time, I asked for email service recommendations and switched to Tuta. It's great, and has made checking my email feel less anxious because no ads or clutter. Thanks to everyone who recommended it, yarnofariadne and octahedrite off the top of my head.

This time I would love your recommendations for newsletter services or Substack alternatives. Ease of use and economy are the main things, because I can't pay for a newsletter service. Perhaps it makes it easier that I don't need advanced features like list segmentation and so on. Mostly, I just need a welcome email that is sent to all incoming subscribers, individual subsciber stats, and good deliverability (don't want to end up in spam). Ideally would let me have a subscriber count of 1000 or so without having to pay a monthly fee, because I foresee quite a jump in subscribers once the anthology is out. (And ideally wouldn't be expensive in case I crossed the free range. Saw Ghost.org's pricing and balked.)

I'm okay with continuing with Substack in the absence of anything else that fits. I'm not going to monetise it, so it isn't going to benefit the shady guys at the top. But it's not ideal, given the shady guys at the top. And there are readers who don't want to touch Substack with a ten-foot pole.

Hence, I'm asking for recommendations! I think there might be something out there that I just haven't heard of.