Planning for the Future
Friends, I have had a wonderful time writing this newsletter, and I want to keep doing it. Your responses have been consistently positive — very generously so. Thanks!
There’s a problem, though: writing this newsletter costs me $240/year, and before too much longer, if subscriptions keep trending upward, that could be $360. If Dr. Johnson believed that no one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money, how would he judge someone who pays to write? It doesn’t bear thinking of.
So I’m going to take a bit of a hiatus to think this over. I am not likely to stay away for a long time — probably not even to the end of this year. But I need to reflect and, eventually, come up with a plan.
I hesitate even to mention the word “subscription,” because we are all up to our necks in subscriptions, to movie services and cable channels and software and diapers-on-Amazon. It’s crazy. But I don't think there’s any other way to fund an ongoing newsletter — unless a Wealthy Patron shows up. So here’s one possible scheme:
- A paid ($2/month? I dunno) newsletter that I pledge to publish at least 40 times a year, and
- A monthly free newsletter — this one, the one to which you’re already subscribed.
Now, if I do that, then one decision would be whether the paid version would continue with my current mix — i.e., most issues are miscellanies of various shiny items I’ve discovered, while a few are focused on a single theme — or to make most issues of the paid newsletter thematically unified.
At the moment I’m inclined towards the latter, because a single-themed edition of a newsletter is like a little personal essay, what some call a familiar essay, and that is my favorite genre in which to write. I used to write far more essays, but the venues for which I wrote them have either died or transmogrified. So the kind of newsletter I envision could mark a return to a mode of writing that I both love and miss.
But I love retrieving things from my cabinet of curiosities too.
So, faithful readers, I need your thoughts and your advice. If you have some time to let me know what you think about all this, I would be most grateful. And I’ll provide news as soon as I can.
Some people still use reference books.
