Substack Spring-Cleaning
A few small changes to subscriptions
You might have noticed (and then again, it’s entirely possible that you did not) that there was no quarterly Snippets of Story post for paid subscribers at the end of the year. That was, simply enough, because I didn’t have enough new and presentable excerpts from works-in-progress to share. Since December and January are always happily busy blogging times, with all those recaps and best-of-the-year posts, I figured skipping it this once wasn’t a big deal.
However, as the end of March approached and I found myself in the same boat again, I had to do some honest thinking about it, and I decided it would be better to discontinue Snippets as a regularly scheduled feature if I can’t be sure of always having material for it at the right times.
But this leaves just some short fiction as my only paid posts—and if I’m going to have paid subscriptions, I want to be offering those subscribers enough value in return. Though it would be wonderful to have a steady income from Substack, I have to face the fact that right now I just can’t turn out enough posts to give both my free and paid subscribers something every month. That could change in the future. But in this particular season of life, I only have the mental and physical energy to do justice to my top priorities—and in the writing department, that means writing the next book.
So for the time being, here’s how it’s going to be. Paid subscriptions will give you access to my archive of paywalled fiction posts, and also basically exist as a voluntary option if you’d like to support an author whose work you enjoy. I will still share paywalled sneak peeks into works-in-progress—just not on a regular schedule. And I will continue to post fiction sometimes, in my usual unscheduled way. But because (a) I suspect that paywalled short fiction, at least in my genre(s), is a hard sell, and (b) at the end of the day I am a writer before I am a promoter and I would rather have my stories read than anything else, I’m going to make those posts free for their first month before they go behind a paywall.
(I would love to serialize some longer work here eventually, but we will not cross that bridge before construction has even begun upon it.)
So, to recap:
Paid subscriptions to The Second Sentence will give you access to my archive of paywalled fiction posts (which currently contains nine short stories and a serialized novella), and occasional sneak peeks into books-in-progress.
Flash fiction posts will stay free. Other short fiction will be free for a month after publication, and then go behind the paywall.
The one exception to that will be short stories from my Mrs. Meade Mysteries series, some of which I plan to publish here soon, which will be free or paid depending on their price on other platforms.
Existing Snippets of Story posts with excerpts from unpublished stories will stay behind the paywall until those stories are published, but posts featuring snippets from my published books are free to browse!
And on a note of addition rather than subtraction…
…to keep things from getting too dull around here while I’m not writing a lot of long-form posts, I’m thinking of adding a new, short (free!) monthly post where I share two or three of the best things I’ve read lately with some commentary or mini-reviews. I’d love to hear what you think of that idea!
And I just want to say thank you to everyone who subscribes here, free or paid. It means a lot to me just that you’re here!
