Moving the recs to Bluesky!
BogiReads brings you the daily speculative reading recommendation of editor Bogi Takács.
Today's recommendation -
B”H
Dear everyone,
Thank you for bearing with me! I know the past year has been frustrating. With Twitter crashing and burning, I moved my daily story recommendations around a bit.
Everyone said “Start a paid newsletter!!”
This proved to be a mess.
Substack seems to work great for many people, but I’m not excited about using a by Nazis, for Nazis kind of website (Facebook is bad enough), so I ruled this out from the get-go.
There are websites to run a paid newsletter that have an absolutely abysmal editing interface. These I tried and discarded before ever launching anything.
There are also good websites to run a free newsletter. Buttondown has a great editing interface, I love it. Unfortunately, it proved absolutely impossible to run a paid newsletter on Buttondown - I’m sure some people managed to get it to work, but I couldn’t. The payment processing would constantly drop people and then even remove them from the free tier, without letting me know. (Thank you to those of you who emailed me about it!) Support was very responsive, but nothing they did helped - the issue was probably on the side of the payment processor and that side of things was just very opaque in general.
I considered starting another Patreon, because Patreon has solid payment processing and it also sends emails. But as I already have another Patreon, this seemed excessive, and I couldn’t quite figure out how to make sure no one pays twice for the same thing.
The good news is, I’m quite confident that no one was billed for no updates - if you were, let me know and I’ll give you something! The problem was more the reverse of everyone getting dropped.
But! But! BUT!!!!!!!!!!!!
(I first typed “BUTTTTT”, but that’s probably not what we mean here.)
Bluesky looks like it’s rapidly becoming a solid Twitter alternative. When I signed up, it didn’t have open registration and barely even had thread support, but this has rapidly changed and more features are added regularly, too. Also, blocking and mute works! Amazing.
So I’m going to restart the daily recs on Bluesky under the hashtag #BogiReads.
The payment method will be similar to what I had on Twitter. Updates are free! The weekly roundups are paid and you can get them on my Patreon. For $3/month, you get the weekly roundups AND all my regular Patreon updates too.
If you are on the $1/$2 legacy tier on my Patreon, I’ll kindly ask you to update to $3, but this is on an honor and affordability basis. :)
If you want to sponsor a story rec, $15 for a short story / poem and $50 for a novelette / novella (this is better with a one-time payment unless you want to do it every month - I have Zelle, Venmo, Paypal). I pick, to avoid conflicts of interest, and you get to choose some text and a link to go with your sponsorship. You can choose genre (science fiction / fantasy / horror).
This is it for now! I’m rolling this out relatively gradually because I need to crosspost it to about a million places, so please bear with me. But I wanted to let you know first! Now you can tell yourself “I survived the Newsletterocalypse!”
I’ll shut down the billing here on Buttondown entirely, but I’ll leave the archives up (I think they are formatted nicely).
Thank you and stay tuned!! I have a rec for today, but I don’t know if I’ll get to it after all the crossposting and announcements - I’ll see. If not, it will be saved for tomorrow!
Take care,
Bogi.