Yeah, all good things come to an end. But also, can’t good things just…get better? Well, we say — they damn well can (or at least, we really freakin’ pretty-pleasin’ hope so). 

First off, don’t worry. All the things you love about our lit mag are not disappearing. 

To be honest, we were supposed to do this after passing year one of existing. But we’re spunky and strappy, so settle in as we shake up our magic lit mag snow globe in the thick of this rainy, sticky summer, and get to revamping our website and socials, plus overhauling the platforms we use…

Aaand. About that. Hey, Substack? Yeah, you. I think it’s time to break up. Oh, why? Well, turns out it feels like a cheap lil game in our already flooded-yet-somehow-still parched social landscape to try to milk every type of content for money and always be thinking about hooks and hits and upticks and monthly vs. annual subscriptions based on (apparently) how much a “post” (at the end of the day, a collection of words, like any other) deserves. 

Hear us out. We still 100% believe writers and creators and editors and all sorts of creatives deserve to be paid and grow and flourish. We just think Substack’s kinda getting a bit funny and…um…icky? The platform doesn’t make it easy for people to unsubscribe, for one. And two, it uses your mailing list to promote other stuff (often stuff that requires a paid subscription) people never signed up for. We can go on. We will. But wait:

Did you know we’re Substack bestsellers? We have some 149 paid subscribers (anyone over a 100 paid subs is considered a bestseller), and as you might recall, when we set up this Substack we very clearly did it as a way to make money for the magazine. Because funny thing…lit mags take money and tons of time to run, ha ha…ha…. (awkward laughter continues into the distance for a long time). 

We did not want to be non-profit pups, trying to scrounge for remnants in a broken system that doesn’t cater to the arts so much as it does to professional grant writers and already well-established foundations. 

We still do not want to be a non-profit. We still intend to continue speaking boldly about all things money, publication, and career-growth for poets and, ultimately, for all creative people. 

So, what does this mean for you as our newsletter subscriber?

Well, not too much just this second. The platform we’ve chosen to shift to for newsletters is MailerLite. We’ve been able to export all our Substack subscribers over there without much hassle. The hassle-y part has been that Substack doesn’t make it that seamless to port over paid subscriptions. 

Our Substack stats tell us our Gross Annualized Revenue is $9086. Which is pretty big for lil lit mags like us, y’know. Of course, be aware that Substack’s way of calculating this revenue is deceiving. It’s Gross Annualized, so what about all the people on monthly plans who might cancel? Yeah, Substack just wants you to assume they won’t, lol (we wish). Of course, another thing to note is that Substack takes a whopping 10% cut, oof. 

However, we’re happy to report that a team member from Substack has been in touch with us and hopefully they’ll help us transfer everything over to Stripe (the platform that Substack and most all of everyone these days) bills through. Stripe can be integrated with MailerLite, so we can actually have far more control over the money we make through paid subscriptions. 

Oh, and since we’re on that topic, we’ll be revamping our subscription model and we’ll write about the how’s and why’s and and whatnot’s over the next couple of weeks. All of you with paid subscriptions already will not lose any of your benefits (like discounts and free subs). Actually, we’ll be creating (we think) a more dynamic subscription model to create more positivity for all of us. 

So, all in all friends, it’s been a fun Substack-y ride, but it’s time to roll up that red carpet. Please know that we will not be deleting this Substack, so everything here will be archived. As Substack helps us move over our subscriptions, we will turn off paid subscriptions here. We will still be posting super cool poetry and writing world insights/interviews/essays/everything on our website which will go out in a regular weekly updates newsletter (psst, you’ll actually be able to select how often you want to hear from us now — one of our foremost reasons for this shift)!

Speaking of which, you’ll hear from us again tomorrow with our Poet of the Week. Super super sorry it’ll be twice back to back like that, but it shouldn’t happen again!

That email will not come as a Substack post, though, but will be sent using MailerLite. You’ll still see “ONLY POEMS” in the “sender” field though :) 

Alright, you probably have questions, and if you do – we’re happy to address them. Reply back to this and we’ll respond fairly quickly. Until then, thank you from our whole freakin’ hearts for being here with us. We can’t wait to discover all the wonderful places we’ll go!