Consolidation!

Changing the way I work on Substack

Hi Friends!

To paraphrase Bilbo in The Fellowship of the Ring, I’ve been feeling a bit like butter spread over too much bread. Specifically, to shift metaphors, I think I'm trying to keep too many plates spinning in Substack. Although I had sort-of hoped that my slightly different projects would find different audiences, I've noticed there's quite a bit of overlap in readership between my blogs. And it's sort-of unfair, in my mind, that some readers are contributing to more than one.

As a result, I think I'll suspend Freethought History and roll it back into MakingHistory for the time being. I'm also thinking I will merge Lifelong Learners back in as well. This will involve offering refunds to some paid subscribers or inviting them to shift their subscriptions to the main (now single) Substack. I might lose a few along the way, but going forward I think it makes more sense to focus all my efforts on one page and send stuff out from clearly-defined sub-categories rather than trying to keep a bunch of newsletters going. Readers will be able to choose which feeds they want to get notifications from, and ignore ones that don’t interest them.

An advantage of migrating all the content over to MakingHistory is that will allow me to repost it all over the next week or so, making up some new sections and filling them in batches. One benefit of this will be that a lot of my content that has found its way behind the paywall will be free for all readers for an additional month. The way I have things set up right now, all my content is free to read until it's a month old, at which time it goes behind the subscription wall into the archive and is only available to contributors.

So maybe by putting all my content in one place and making a bunch of it free to new readers again, I'll be able to move forward this summer in a more understandable and inviting way. Actually, now that I’m doing this, I think I'll make all my content including the archives free for a couple of weeks, as I'm making this transition. So tell your friends, if you think they might find some of this stuff interesting! This is a "relaunch" of sorts, so it's an ideal time to subscribe and check out the nearly thousand posts I've published since I started here in April 2020.

Thanks for your attention and support,

—Dan