Email platforms for writers in 2024

Writers have never had it so good

Towards the tail end of 2023 I innocently asked readers what platforms they’re most interested in - either that they’re already using, or would like to know more about.

70 replies later, turns out people really want to know more about their options. I’m not surprised, given the volatility of online spaces in the 2020s. Go back a decade, or two, and there was at least the perception of platform stability.

Remember when it was inconceivable that Twitter would simply…go away?

There’s been a proliferation of platforms vying for the attention of writers (and readers), which has made it an increasingly complicated scene to enter and navigate. This article is my first attempt to find my way through the maze, and hopefully it’ll help you as well.

I’ve had to split this into multiple posts. Today I’m taking a look at email platforms. Next time, I’ll look at other platforms that are useful for writers: crowdfunding, serialisation, self-publishing and so on.

Obvious caveat: I will have missed things from the list. If your favourite platform or service isn’t mentioned, I’ll see you down in the comments!

A quick note about licensing

It’s important to protect your work when sharing it online. There are two aspects to this when publishing online:

1. Can you trust the organisation behind the platform you are using?

2. Can you stop individuals from copying and potentially repurposing your work?

#1 is all about making sure you’re working with reputable websites and companies. Always check the T&Cs, especially if you’re posting your work to their servers. T&Cs are massively boring but in this case it’s about valuing your work and looking after it. The general rule of thumb is that you’ll need to grant any platform you use a license to use your work (otherwise they can’t actually show it), but within carefully specified parameters.

This is Ghost’s licensing term, as an example:

Grant of license: By submitting Your Content to Ghost Foundation's Services, you grant Ghost Foundation a perpetual, irrevocable, world-wide, sublicensable, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish Your Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your site.

It’s quite broad, as these tend to be. You’re giving them permission to publish, adapt and reproduce your work forever. It sounds scary. The important bit is at the end: ‘…solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your site.’

In other words, they can’t take your writing and sell it as a book without permission. They can’t go off and make it into a movie. Watch out for any platform that has an unrestricted license, or which claims actual copyright/ownership over the submitted content.

Also note the vital ‘non-exclusive’ clause. This means you’re not locked in to the platform. You can still take your writing and put it elsewhere, in whatever way you want.

As for concern #2, of unscrupulous individuals stealing your work for their own ends: well, no, you can’t really stop that. Piracy exists. Large corporations, having fought it impotently for decades, are now trying to own it through the mass scraping of data by their AI models. If you can’t beat ‘em, etc.

Thing is, no professional agent, editor or publisher is going to engage with stolen material, so you don’t need to worry about your book suddenly showing up on the NYT bestseller list with someone else’s name attached.¹

But you might see your words show up on other dodgy sites. Remember though, people who really value your work, the ones you want to connect with, will always come straight to you. They’re not going to pirate your work. Generally, any measures you put in place to try to stop it will primarily only harm your legitimate readers/customers.

My advice would be to not get all King Canute about piracy. It’ll just be a waste of your time. Focus on the readers that matter.

OK, on with the show.

Newsletters in 2024

The cool new kid on the block, newsletters are where it is at.

Except, they’re old. Really old! Email lists have been a thing since at least the 90s and haven’t really changed all that much. You write a newsletter, it gets sent out to lots of people. Simple. In fact, word has it that this was invented long before the internet, and used to go via paper envelopes and postboxes. Crazy, I know.

The technical process has evolved. Sticking emails into a BCC list doesn’t really scale. Rewind a decade and Mailchimp was the obvious go-to. Big corporations used it, as did individuals and small companies. The emphasis was on marketing-style emails and looking professional.

The big shift in the last five years-or-so has been the introduction of a new kind of newsletter service, which focuses more on writers and long-form writing, rather than image-heavy corporate promo pieces with complex layouts.

Here’s the thing about mailing lists: you should have started building yours about twenty years ago. If you don’t have one yet, the time to start is right now. A list of people genuinely interested in your work that you can communicate with directly, independent of unpredictable social networks, is immensely valuable. Over-zealous spam filters aside, it’s a far more reliable mode of communications than social networks.

Even if you’re traditionally published and doing very well for yourself, thank you very much, you should still be building a list. If you’re brand new and nobody knows who you are, you should be building a list. If you’re self-published you should definitely be building a list.

There are no real drawbacks to building a list of enthusiastic readers. Do it now. It doesn’t mean you have to fully commit to the newsletter game, but it’ll give you options and agency.

Let’s look at what you can use.

Substack

This is the biggie. The cool kid in town. Also the troubled kid. The pseudo-intellectual kid with delusions of grandeur and naïve political opinions. Substack is a lot of things.

The short version is: I use Substack for this newsletter. As a toolkit for writers it’s incredible and I highly recommend it. Here’s what you get:

• A very easy-to-use interface and newsletter editor

• An accompanying website with all your material on it

• An easy option to receive income from paid subscriptions

• You can also use Substack to host video and podcasts

• Pretty good community features, making it easy to get feedback on your work and drive discussions

• There’s an integrated social network that is superficially similar to Twitter of old, called Notes. So far, I’ve found it pleasant and quite useful.

• A highly effective recommendation engine

• There’s a lovely community of fiction and non-fiction writers

Can you export your data & followers? Yes ✅

What’s the cost? Free to use. If you activate paid subscribers, Substack takes a 10% cut.

What’s the moderation & safeguarding policy? Substack has been in the news a lot for hosting newsletters that are written by deeply unpleasant people. Anti-trans, anti-vax and extreme far right goons. Substack generally resists any kind of moderation or content policing, except for banning porn. Quite often the Substack leadership’s absolutist opinions on freedom of speech and their embracing of culture war politics and fringe figures is at best tedious and at worse damaging.

The other wrinkle is that each Substack publication is its own siloed island. As such, the moderation emphasis is on the writer. I can block/ban/mute people causing problems in my community quite easily. The idea is that my publication is mine, and it’s up to me to look after it. In theory, this makes sense. If I’m getting unpleasant comments on my Wordpress website, it’s not really up to Wordpress to sort it. But in practise it’s fiddlier. I’m a white, middle-aged straight guy in the UK who writes fun scifi stories. I’m generally not going to be the target of online harassment. It’s not that simple for everyone. And with the introduction of Notes and the recommendations network across Substack (both of which are fantastic tools), publications aren’t as isolated as they once were.

Wait. So if you’re left-leaning, or progressive, or don’t like Nazis, or find the polarised politics in the US extremely juvenile, or don’t have time to moderate bad actors, you shouldn’t use Substack? Well, it’s complicated.

I’m still here, and I really hate Nazis. I think freedom of speech is an ongoing societal discussion rather than an absolute. But I’m not going to run away from every place that has awful people, because eventually I’ll have nowhere left to go, and the only voices left will be the horribles.²

Where you sit on this kind of thing is a very personal decision. But if you use any online platform, at all, you will be sharing it with the worst of humanity. I don’t know what the solution is, other than to write furiously and publish more words than them.

For the record, my experience of community on Substack has been 99.9% hugely positive. It’s the best fiction writing group I’ve ever been a part of.

If you do go down the Substack road, I have some tutorials to get you started. Here’s the first in the series:

What actually is Substack?

Ghost

The closest competitor to Substack, at least in terms of features, is Ghost. They’ve got a similar-ish model to Wordpress, in that you can use their off-the-shelf package for a fee, or roll your own with the open source version.

Ghost has the same core design as Substack, mixing newsletters and a website together. Two key differences are that Ghost gives you a lot more design flexibility, and that there are no social/networking features. Your Ghost newsletter will be your own island, without intrusion from other Ghost writers.

Part of that flexibility includes integrations with third party apps and systems. With Substack you get what you’re given. With Ghost, you can customise your setup and the experience of your readers. The interface is modern and pleasant to use, the editor reminds me of old school Medium, and the whole thing is slickly executed.

Oh and Ghost is a non-profit. Which is cool, and also makes them less likely to do mad Musky things in pursuit of profit.

Can you export your data & followers? Yes

. ✅

What’s the cost? There are two ways of doing Ghost. Ghost Pro is a service you pay for where everything is taken care of and you pay a subscription fee. You can also use the open source version to host your own Ghost setup, which is free but obviously comes with considerably higher technical know-how (and you’ll still need to pay for hosting). Ghost Pro’s cost scales based on your subscriber numbers, so it’s quite variable. For example:

• If you have under 500 subscribers:

  • $9 per month for the basic plan.

  • If you want custom integrations and themes that goes up to $25 per month.

• I currently have over 3,000 subscribers, which puts m into a different price bracket:

  • The basic plan is $15 per month.

  • The custom plan is $65 per month.

For me, then, it’d be $180 per year minimum, or $780 if I wanted to actually take advantage of Ghost’s more flexible setup. That’s not really doable for me.

However, Ghost doesn’t take a cut of your subscriber revenue.

The calculation here is immediately obvious: if you write a newsletter as a hobby and don’t have much or any income from it, Ghost doesn’t really make sense. You’re paying quite a lot just to write your stuff.

If your newsletter is more of a business, then Ghost suddenly becomes much more exciting. You’re paying a fixed rate, scalable to your customer base, that is entirely separate from your actual paid income.

Whether you have 10 or 10,000 paid subscribers, Substack will always take 10% of your income, which is going to be increasingly painful. Ghost, on the other hand, takes a fixed amount (relative to total subscriber numbers) and doesn’t care how much you’re actually making from your newsletter.

What’s the moderation & safeguarding policy? During the Substack content moderation controversy at the end of 2023, a lot of writers decamped to Ghost. The founder of Ghost gave assurances that they wouldn’t allow Nazi content. The reality is slightly more complex, given that there’s a free open source option. Much like with Wordpress, anyone can use Ghost tech if they want, and Ghost can’t do much about that - that’s the whole point of open source software, in a way.

The T&Cs are clear, though, and comprehensive.

Medium

I started out publishing non-fiction on Medium, about a decade ago. It was an exciting new space that emphasised long-form, high quality writing and its model seemed to encouraged quality. It was, therefore, entirely at odds with the rest of the internet, which was doubling down on micro-blogging and video. Medium’s interface was beautiful for both writers and readers: simple, clean, uncluttered. It was all about the words on the page.

Medium was also one of the first platforms to introduce the ability to be paid for your writing. By opting into their partner program, you would get a cut of overall Medium subscription revenue, based on how much your work had been read. An intriguing concept back when accepted wisdom was that everything on the internet had to be free and ad-supported. For readers, it was a single, simple subscription to Medium itself, that then unlocked all the writing on the platform.³

Then it all got a bit weird. The payment model kept changing. More and more features were layered on top. They introduced ‘publications’, which were sort-of-magazines, and tried to make that a thing. The feed for what you were reading became increasingly algorithmic, to the point that I could never find the writers I actually had chosen to follow.

Classic enshittification, basically.

At some point they introduced a form of newslettering, but it was convoluted and awkward. The payment system never seemed to really take off, and the whole platform was just a bit too obtuse. I could never get a firm handle on what it was, or what it wasn’t.

Logging back into Medium for the first time in a while, as part of researching this article, my feed is a bizarre mix of things I’m actually interested in and just endless articles about AI. It’s hard to know if this is because of things I’ve read in the past, or something else…again, it’s hard to pin down how Medium works.

That lack of clarity is what pushed me towards Substack in the first place. What strikes me now is the uncertainty around how the partner program works. Here’s what their FAQ says:

Earnings will be based on member read and listen time as well as member engagement signals. This includes claps, highlights, replies, and new follows. Reads and read ratios will be defined as people who read your story for 30 seconds or more divided by total views. More information on how earnings are calculated can be found here with examples featured here.

I don’t really get how you’re supposed to have any kind of predictable income from your writing when there are so many fuzzy factors involved.

Compare this to Ghost or Substack, where income is entirely based on how many paying subscribers a writer has. I have a much firmer idea of how my subscriber count could fluctuate over time. There are still lots of unknown factors, of course, but the core exchange with Ghost and Substack is between the writer and the reader, and whether the reader sees something of value (or a writer they want to support). Medium, on the other hand, introduces a lot of additional calculations that are outside of the writer’s direct control.

Ultimately, Medium feels to me like it was a necessary stepping stone between traditional social media platforms and the newsletter scene of Ghost and Substack. That, for me at least, has left Medium in an awkward space. Then again, it’s reinvented itself more than once, so we may not yet have seen its final form.

Can you export your data & followers? Sort of? They’ve added features over time so that you can run a more traditional newsletter setup, but it sits alongside the general Medium readership so might not include all of your followers. Yes, it’s confusing. ❓

What’s the cost? Free to use. If you want to be part of the partner program (and therefore be eligible to receive revenue share), you need to also be a member of Medium, which is $5 per month or $60 per year.

What’s the moderation & safeguarding policy? Medium has a comprehensive content policy. I don’t have enough recent experience to assess how well they enforce it, but it’s a decent starting point.

Buttondown

Back when I was thinking about getting into the newsletter game, Buttondown was the first service I tried, before Substack. Back then it was run by a single guy and had a cosy homebrew sort of feel. Comics writer Kieron Gillen uses it, which is how I heard about it in the first place.

It’s a more stripped-down experience on the surface, but has a wealth of functionality if you’re the sort of person who likes to tinker. In fact, since I last used it in 2021 it seems to have massively evolved and is quite feature rich now. A big appeal is that it’s down-to-earth and isn’t trying to change the world, like every other damned start-up and tech company.

Buttondown is a newsletter service for people who are fed up of Silicon Valley bullshit, basically. The people I spoke to there were very helpful and normal.

Can you export your data & followers? Yep, you’re in control. ✅

What’s the cost? If you have less than 100 subscribers, it’s free. It then scales up from there. Up to 1,000 subscribers is $9 per month. Up to 5,000 is $29 per month. So that’s cheaper than Ghost, but you still get a lot of customisation, API access and so on.

What’s the moderation & safeguarding policy? It seems to be pretty bare bones, to be honest. Then again, Buttondown is more like Gmail: it has no networking functionality like Substack. It’s a tool, and doesn’t really claim to be much more than that. While they highlight Substack’s lacklustre content moderation, I wasn’t able to find much detail on Buttondown’s own approach⁴. Lots of people decamped from Substack to Buttondown in January, so presumably they all concluded that it was a more suitable place for them from a content moderation perspective.

Beehiiv

This is in some ways the new kid on the block, and the one with lots of momentum.

Their promotional copy is very heavy on the corporate angle. It’s all about building a brand and a business with a newsletter at its heart. From that it seems that they’re going after the Mailchimp crowd rather than the Substack type. There’s heavy flavourings of start-up. They emphasise AI being a core feature.

One very interesting feature is the inclusion of a recommendation system and networking features, similar to Substack’s. Ghost and Buttondown seem to have deliberately avoided this approach, while Beehiiv is very much following Substack’s lead.

Beehiiv wants to be a stable, reliable place to build a business or brand. It’s perhaps less obviously aimed at writers, but there’s no reason it can’t still be a good option.

Except…

…there’s a really bonkers bit in their T&Cs.

In the ‘content standards’ section, they list a bunch of things, and it’s quite comprehensive, and fairly typical. A lot more detailed than Buttondown, more along the lines of Ghost’s T&Cs.

You know, this kind of thing:

Contain any material that is defamatory, obscene, indecent, abusive, offensive, harassing, violent, hateful, inflammatory, or otherwise objectionable, or that could reasonably incite violence based on protected classes (e.g., incite credible threats of physical harm to people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition).

All fair enough.

Then you get to the ninth entry in the list of banned content:

[You must not] Cause annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety or be likely to upset, embarrass, alarm, or annoy any other person.

🤔

Yikes.

As I mentioned up top, I’m absolutely not a free speech obsessive. I think spaces should be safe, and debate should be rich and heated and deep and intelligent, and the notion of free speech doesn’t mean it’s ok to be a total arsehole.

But that line in Beehiiv’s T&Cs really startled me. I had to re-read it a few times to make sure I wasn’t over-reacting. No matter how I look at it, it seems to be declaring your writing must not elicit an emotional response.

Fiction can often cause anxiety and alarm. I mean, have you read horror? Story endings frequently annoy people. And that’s just fiction. If you consider creative non-fiction, journalism, political writing - I mean, that’s going to cause annoyance right? Even if it isn’t trying to, that’s just the result of writing something that matters, about which people will have differing and strong opinions.

I still think I must be misinterpreting this, because it’s just too mad. But there it is.

Perhaps it stems from their business focus. They want to be a stable platform to build a brand upon, and avoid the perils demonstrated by Twitter/X becoming so toxic that companies have suspended advertising and left.

Can you export your data & followers? Yep. ✅

What’s the cost? Free up to 2,500 subscribers, which is a lot more generous than other options. Beyond 2,500 it jumps to $42 per month, sitting in-between Buttondown and Ghost.

What’s the moderation & safeguarding policy? Er, see above. 🤷

Mailchimp

The veteran, Mailchimp has been around for ages. It’s fiddly, unnecessarily complex to use for writing, and entirely aimed at corporate use.

It’s very powerful if you want to create automated sequences, or incorporate it into a wider sales funnel. Specifically for writers, I wouldn’t recommend it - it will make everything harder, simply because it has very different use cases in mind.

Can you export your data & followers? Yes. ✅

What’s the cost? Up to 500 subscribers there’s a free plan with basic features. Get more subscribers and pricing begins at £21 per month but then scales up rapidly. I’d be on the ‘up to 5,000’ subscribers band, at £60 per month.

What’s the moderation & safeguarding policy? The usual stuff! Mailchimp is a background service. Nobody goes around saying ‘subscribe to my Mailchimp’. Most people want Mailchimp itself to be invisible, so they rarely get into the weeds around moderation and enforcement.

ConvertKit

Take Mailchimp’s features but aim them at creators instead of corporations and you end up with something like ConvertKit. It’s Mailchimp’s cool younger sibling.

Intriguingly, they’ve more recently added creator networking features and a recommendation engine, like you see on Substack. So you’ve got the email automation and CRM features of Mailchimp, the email and API capabilities of Ghost and Buttondown and the creator focus of Substack.

If you’re interested in developing your creator practice as a business, this might be the one for you. It might also be overkill and overly complex if you just want to do some writing.

Can you export your data & followers? Yes. ✅

What’s the cost? Up to 1,000 subscribers it’s free, but you miss out on a lot of the best features. To get the full feature-set you’re looking at $9 per month for up to 300 subs, scaling up from there. For over 3,000 subscribers you’re looking at $66 per month.

What’s the moderation & safeguarding policy? Took me a while to find their usage policy, and it looks like the usual stuff. However, there’s a definite emphasis on quality of content, rather than on types of content. They don’t want you to use their services for spam or low quality material. It’s interesting how much they mix together rules against dodgy business practices with rules against harmful content.

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OK, that’s 4,000 words just on the leading newsletter platforms. In a future post I’ll also take a look at crowdfunding and serialisation platforms, which make up the other pieces of the puzzle for online writers.

It’s also worth taking a look at Russell Nohelty’s newsletter, as he frequently covers this sort of thing. For more general platform and media analysis, Simon Owens's Media Newsletter is worth a look, as is Platformer.

I wrote this in February 2024. If you’re reading from the future, things may well have changed.

So - do hop into the comments to let me know if I missed anything, and to share what you prefer to use and why.

Meanwhile, I’ll see some of you on Wednesday for the next episode of the Babylon 5 rewatch, and on Friday for a new chapter of Tales from the Triverse.

Thanks for reading - hope this was useful!

1. I was at EasterCon waaay back in 2008 (the one with Neil Gaiman) and saw the most extreme example of this. A woman in the audience on a panel about publishing your work was worried about sending her manuscript to agents or editors, because she was convinced they would steal it. The professional authors on the panel politely explained why an agent would never work again if they indulged in such thievery. The woman remained unconvinced, absolutely certain in her belief that her work was of such import that it couldn’t possibly be shown to anyone for fear of it being stolen.

2. This is an evolving situation, and my thoughts are also in flux. My position on any of this could change.

3. I’m still waiting to see if Substack introduces something like this down the line, or perhaps provides tools with which groups of writers can combine forces to offer group subscriptions e.g. the Fictionistas crowd could potentially benefit from an optional group sub to all Fictionistas writers. Or a group of science fiction writers could band together to provide discounted access. Almost like multiple writers contributing to a magazine.

4. Let me know if you have more detailed information on this aspect, and I’ll happily update the article.