Driftless Times Media

I’m excited to announce we’re off Substack. Our newsletter has moved entirely to DriftlessTimesMedia.com.

This move is not a negative change but a positive shift in our content strategy. In fact, I’m making this change with our audience in mind and hope to provide a better experience for them moving forward. There’s been a lot of fun things I’ve wanted to do that Substack is not equipped for.

Most importantly, if you were subscribed to the Substack before March 15, 20205, there is nothing you need to do. I’ve already migrated active subscribers to the new mailing list, so most subscribers won’t need to do a thing. Our content will continue on its usual schedule and subscribers won’t even notice a name change in your inbox! If you want to make sure you’re signed up for the newsletter, follow this link: https://driftlesstimesmedia.com/subscribe/

As for past content, we’ve backed it all up to DriftlessTimesMedia.com under the new Newsletter section.

You might be wondering if it is all still free. Yes! We’ve never run ads and we don’t charge a fee for anything. We’ll only charge for content when demand justifies it and we’d have to scale back our professional working hours to meet it. When that day comes, it’ll be a good problem to have, but we are not there yet.

What can you expect from this shift? Chiefly, a more robust experience. Substack has a lot of drawbacks from a publishing and content creation standpoint. Using MailPoet integrated with DriftlessTimesMedia.com opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

For example, there is not an efficient way to utilize evergreen content with Substack. We have a decent library built up that new subscribers rarely peruse. Lately, there have also been times when something happened in the news that applied to what we’ve talked about in the past. Now, with MailPoet, I can use our library of content quickly and easily, adding context and generating conversation with you, the audience, as it applies.

We’ve been running experiments behind the scenes and the newsletter content we’ve shared there is getting picked up by WordPress readers without promotion, proper tagging, etc. It’s been exciting and I’m hopeful you all from Substack will appreciate joining what seems to be an active WordPress reader base. You know I’m big on community building in these turbulent times, and I’m looking forward to this leading to a fruitful, fun group of readers.

Additionally, there’s also the obvious benefit of having all of our content under one roof and totally, no questions asked, owning it.

For starters, Substack no longer has its questionable fingers all over my stuff.

Second, I’ve been encountering the problem of people attributing my work to the people who share it. It’s great that people find my writing worthy of sharing, but since Substack is open to anyone, readers often assume the sharer is also the author — unless they clarify otherwise when linking to it. Hopefully, since only one person owns and operates DriftlessTimesMedia.com — me — that’ll happen less often moving forward.

And lastly, I’ve got an idea percolating for a zine that’ll flex my fiction and alternate reality game muscles — which Substack is wholly unequipped for — but more on that later in the year.

Now, there’s one drawback to this shift. WordPress isn’t known as a newsletter hub like Substack, so I’ve added a few light-touch subscription popups. I’ve kept them as unobtrusive as possible — just once a week on the home page or archives and once every two weeks on newsletter posts unless you’re clearing cookies constantly. Hopefully, they won’t be too much of a nuisance; I’ve made some fun creatives for them, which have been sprinkled throughout this announcement.

I plan to retain my personal Substack account to keep following the other great writers and publications on here — such as The Observer, Erin In The Morning and The Honest Broker — and will likely promote new writing at Driftless Times through that account as notes. However, the Driftless Times Media part of Substack will be deleted by the end of April.

Thank you all for reading and subscribing so far as we near our first anniversary! Here’s to greener pastures and fresher, more engaging content — make sure you’re subscribed!