Tuesday, June 3, 2025

This is the fiftieth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. Wait a second, wasn’t the last post on Substack also the fiftieth? Well, actually it wasn’t. I missed one along the way, so this is the for real 50th post. Hooray!

So here we are, all together as one big happy subscriber family. You’re getting this email for one of two reasons: either you subscribed to my newsletter on Substack, or you signed up for one of my books through a BookFunnel group promotion. I suppose you also could have signed up using the form on the main website, too. No matter how you got here, you are in for a treat.

At any time from now into the future, if you decide you’ve had enough, just use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of this post. If your inbox is too full, you can also subscribe via the RSS feed, though you’ll miss out on a few features that way.

Like I said in yesterday’s post (the 49th), the Substack site will remain active until I have everything 100% migrated over. Short stories are ready to read here on this platform, not including the Frontier Flora tales, which will live on World Anvil from now on. The serial versions of Octave of Stars and Vivi & the All-Lands Tournament will eventually move there as well, but until then they’re still where they’ve always been.

Everything is mostly stable, or so I hope. Now, the big question that you’re probably wondering, why go through all of this? The easiest one is that maintaining two lists at once is just too difficult. I started the original newsletter, the ZMT Books Dispatch, in March of 2023, and sent out a few newsletters using MailerLite before switching to Zoho Campaigns. The schedule was two emails per month, plus extra for major events like the first day of each season.

I started a Substack right about the same time, oddly, since so many of my other author friends were doing it as well. I used it to write a few articles and post some short stories, and while I encouraged my dispatch readers to sign up for the Substack also, most didn’t, so I helped them along by doing a mass import earlier this year. Then I had to worry about which people had unsubscribed from one and not the other, and should I just take them off both lists? It was a headache.

Then I got the crazy idea to start the (near) daily micro-newsletter West Wind, and since then almost 3700 monthly visitors have stopped by to read what I have to say. Which is pretty humbling, to say the least! So why move away from a platform where I would be considered relatively successful? Because of this.

I’ve narrated several short stories so far, and a few articles, and a whole audiobook, too! Audio content is very important to my creative brand, and with the upcoming release of the narrated version of Paper & Feathers, I knew I wanted to structure it in a podcast-style serial format rather than just a straight audiobook. Substack offers podcast services, but of course they’ll host the audio files for you, just like they do for media embedded in a regular post. I learned through some digging that the files are actually hosted on AWS servers, and in keeping with our principles, any alternative to an Amazon product should be pursued if at all possible. And it turns out that it is.

World Anvil’s manuscripts feature, where the Frontier Flora stories are currently hosted, allow you to include an audio file in each chapter/story, but you have to provide a link to YouTube, SoundCloud, or Spotify, none of which are options. You can also host it yourself, which I was doing for a while, on the same server that zmthomas.com runs on. Only thing was, the hosting provider recently changed things up and I went from “Unlimited” storage to only 10 GB. I knew I might be able to fit all of P&F on there, but then what about Octave? And the next story?

I had a little bit more storage on my Zoho WorkDrive, which is how I’ve included the names of all the Florabeasts on their article pages. But it isn’t really designed for podcast hosting; accessing each file is a little tricky and involves embed codes.

Enter DigitalOcean. After having used them in college to run servers for testing code, I found out I could host audio files there and include them in the WA manuscript. But I still couldn’t include it in a Substack post.

That’s why we’re here today. Beehiiv is the newsletter provider that does everything I ever wanted Substack to do. The audio embeds are linked directly from DigitalOcean, which doesn’t use AWS. I can add subscribers via API, which is how I get BookFunnel readers on board without having to export CSV files. I have a LOT more control over the formatting and structure of each post, which is very nice.

That will come into play very soon, for the monthly Dispatch newsletter. I include links to BookFunnel promotions, which help me and other authors find new readers, but they expire after a month or so. That wasn’t a problem when the newsletter was only available via email, but now that it will be preserved in a searchable, indexed web site forever, it seems a little tacky to include a bunch of old links. But, Beehiiv allows for individual sections of an email to be hidden on the web, making them email-exclusive!

Of course, it isn’t perfect. It still uses AWS for many parts of the application, and lacks certain features I enjoyed in Substack like sections, and previous/next links at the bottom of each page. It also doesn’t have the same kind of social network-like recommendations features, notes, chat, or anything else. But I didn’t really use any of those things anyway, so it’s probably fine!

Wow! Nearly 1,000 words from a newsletter that’s supposed to be short and to the point. What happened? I promise, the next few won’t be this long.

I truly appreciate all of you who’ve shown your interest in my books and stories, and have read through the last newsletter, this one, and everything that will come next. You are the reason why I do this, so thank you!