For many years, I’ve maintained a personal announcements email list, which I send out about six to eight times a year, running through my latest projects and upcoming ones, and sometimes offering discounts. I’ve also had an active Patreon for several years, but I never quite got into the groove over there. Patreon has been very successful for people with a larger audience feedback loop, who are creating a recurring sort of thing: videos, podcasts, cartoons, fiction, and so forth. My particular writing niche never quite fit!

So last week, I upgraded the announcement list with a premium option. Regular subscribers still get infrequent project updates. But folks who pay a suggested $3 a month (you pay from $1 to whatever you like) receive at least one new article or essay every month, plus access to premium archives, where I’ll be posting my back catalog of articles. (If you are a Patreon member, please read this post.)

The sorts of things I’ll post are like this sampling, which have appeared on Patreon, Medium, and my How Comics Were Made newsletter (which is being retired in favor of this one):

• The Typewriter Is Not a Typesetter: A 1919 wildcat typesetting strike led some magazines to conclude—incorrectly and briefly—that typewriters had finally reached the quality necessary to produce type for printing.
• Bogus! The century of paying typesetters to set copy that was thrown away. This long-standing practice of “bogus” copy took a change of eras to die out.
• Who Draws Doonesbury? Combating the recurring myth in a corner of comicdom: that Garry Trudeau hasn’t “drawn” Doonesbury since the early 1970s.
• Hard as Boilerplate: The literal origin of the term boilerplate and how it transformed quickly into a metaphor in printing and in legalese.
• Gray Areas: Newspapers and syndicates didn’t allow gray tints in cartoons, while magazines did, resulting in a very different look as the original artwork progressed through production.

People paying at least $3 per month will receive book excerpts, access to live Q&As, early access to new projects, discounts, and more as I think of it! The newsletter format is much more ideally suited to my purposes, and I hope you’ll like it.

I’ve already had enough people sign up to make the math work, so new subscriptions will increase the time I can devote to more topics, and also help with a travel budget for future research.