As I sit here looking out at the backyard, the grass is looking very green thanks to this month getting off to a pretty soggy start. Can those May flowers be far behind? Weather-wise the weekend was somewhat dreary, but lunch with some good friends on Sunday brought some brightness to a gray day.

The house next door is getting ever closer to being done so that our new neighbors can move in. Though yesterday my timing was impeccable, and I wound up having to hop out of the shower and run over there with a sopping wet head of conditioner-soaked hair to receive a delivery. Anyway, speaking of moving and such I wanted to write about moving this blog/newsletter from Substack over to WordPress, which admittedly will likely be a somewhat technical and not exactly thrilling post for most of my readers. Sorry about that! If you are interested in the whys and hows of this move, though, then keep reading.

I began using Substack about two years ago. At the time it was one of the hot new sites that other creators I followed were using, so I decided to hop on the bandwagon. Before switching to Substack I was using a paid mailing list service to send out my once a month (though admittedly I had trouble sticking to this schedule) free newsletters. Originally I was using MailChimp, but their prices got so high I ended up switching to SendInBlue, which was more affordable, but still kind of pricey for someone who wasn’t exactly bringing in the big bucks with her books. Plus I also had to pay annually for a virtual mailbox because when you send out to a mailing list you are required to put a physical address in your email, and I was not comfortable putting my home address on it.

Substack would let me import my mailing list and send to it as often as I liked for the grand price of zero dollars. Plus they would use their physical address on the emails so I didn’t have to pay for that virtual mailbox. I also liked that they offered a sort of blog page that would host all my past posts. So, I made the switch over to Substack and switched over to sending out new newsletters on a weekly as opposed to a monthly basis because for some reason this was an easier schedule for me to follow. (No, I don’t understand it either.)

There were a few things I didn’t care for about Substack. It’s definitely more geared to people publishing paid newsletters. I never had any intention of charging for a subscription to this newsletter, and though I took efforts to remove any suggestion that folks would need to pay to support this publication, there were still automatic Substack buttons that appeared asking readers to pledge their support and such, which I found a little annoying. The blog page itself was not really customizable, but hey that’s what you get for free. Then there was the Nazi problem.

If you’ve spent any amount of time on social media sites, then you’re probably aware that among Substack’s many creators are some who are (this is not an exaggeration) Nazis. Okay, but there are some truly awful people all over social media, so why should it matter that they’re also on Substack? Well, with paid newsletters Substack is not only giving these individuals a chance to earn money Substack is also profiting from hate.

For this reason, there are many who boycott Substack entirely, and I can’t blame them. I tried to justify still using the site because as someone who was only a free user it wasn’t like I was financially supporting them in any way, but definitely this was something that factored into my decision to leave the platform.

I had seen a few different places suggested as Substack alternatives. All the newsletter services I saw wouldn’t really work for me. First of all, I didn’t want to go back to paying a monthly fee to send out my newsletter as I had with MailChimp and SendInBlue. While there are some services that let you send to a smaller list for free, my list was big enough that it would have bumped me up in the paid category. I also wanted to make sure I didn’t have to pay for a virtual mailbox or PO box to send out a newsletter.

What I really wanted was a website where I could host my blog and then automatically send out an email to everyone when I wrote a new post. So, I hunted around on the internet, and eventually determined that the best option for me was a WordPress.com site. WordPress has been around for awhile. I’ve had an account apparently since 2009, which is an eternity on the internet.

One thing to note is that the term WordPress is used to describe both WordPress.com sites and WordPress.org sites. Though they are very similar, they also are completely different entities. You are reading this right now on a WordPress.com site (unless you are reading it in your email inbox). My other websites, AlissaGrosso.com and AlissaCarin.com are actually WordPress.org sites. For what I wanted to do, setting up a blog and emailing it to my mailing list automatically, I found that WordPress.com was the best tool for the job.

WordPress.com has a built in newsletter tool that allows you to automatically send out new posts to your mailing list for free. They use their physical address on these emails so that you don’t have to go through the trouble of registering for a virtual mailbox or PO box. They also have a really useful free tool that allows you to import both your mailing list from Substack as well as all your existing posts on Substack. While you can do all this for free, I did end up paying for some site upgrades. So, my total annual cost for the year for this site is actually $96 plus the cost of the domain name which I already owned. Compared to having to pay monthly fees for a mailing list service this was a much, much better deal. (WordPress also allows me the option to add a few small ads to these post pages, and so any income from those ads can help to defray the small cost of this site.)

My experience with transferring things over from Substack was that it went really smoothly. The tools to import both my posts and my list went well. I did find that on the older posts the comments didn’t import, and I’m guessing this was due to some change Substack made along the way.

For my new posts the way the comments work is a little different than how Substack works, and this will take some getting used to for both me and for readers. If readers don’t log in or don’t fill in an email and a nickname, the comment will show up as anonymous. You can opt to require all commenters to enter an email address and nickname in order to comment. The emails do not display on the site, but I was hesitant to make this a requirement because I didn’t want to scare away commenters who might think their email address would be displayed.

The WordPress block editor is pretty easy to use, but it does take some getting used to. As someone who has been creating websites since WYSIWYG editors were exciting new technology, I appreciate how easy the block editor is to work with. That said, I did spend some time wrangling with things to get it to look just the way I wanted it to, in part because I can be picky and particular about things. (See last week’s post about shoes.)

Overall, the transition from Substack to WordPress went surprisingly smoothly. At the time Substack was exactly what I needed, but in time I felt I had outgrown the service, and just had some reservations about playing in someone else’s sandbox.

Okay, sorry to get all boring and technological this week, but I did want to explain the reasons for the move and some details about it for anyone else looking for alternatives to Substack.

— Alissa

P.S. I promise to do some more giveaways in the future, but in the meantime did you happen to see that Bookshop.org has a free books for life giveaway?

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This week’s inspiration

What I’m reading: Three Wild Dogs (And the Truth) by Marcus Zusak

What I’m watching: His Three Daughters

What I’m listening to: A very loud bird somewhere in our yard who is singing an elaborate and not especially melodic song

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