30% Off Principled Subscriber Discount – and an Open Disclosure of Auntie Bulletin Business Finances

Hello, my dear auntie,

I'm reaching out to you because you're one of the small but mighty group of Auntie Bulletin subscribers who read this newsletter on Ghost, and I'm hoping you'll chip in a little money to keep our "parallel platform" option afloat. As an enticement, I'm currently offering 30% off Auntie Bulletin subscriptions, forever, for readers on Ghost only.

Now, I don't know this for a fact, but I strongly suspect that you chose to get The Auntie Bulletin via Ghost because Substack gives you the ethical ick in some way. Lord knows it does me – which I wrote about a bit here. I'm not yet in a financial position to move off Substack entirely: its discoverability, recommendation, and growth features are still miles ahead of any other platform, and I rely on them heavily to get the word out. Yet I really appreciate the principled readers like you who have weathered the totally optional friction of changing platforms, and in the process have helped me understand how a full-scale move might work when the time comes. Which I'm pretty sure it will.

Right now, six readers are paying $7 monthly or $70 annually to read The Auntie Bulletin via Ghost, which, after Stripe's payment processing fees, comes out to about $35 per month in incoming revenue. Yet distributing the newsletter on this platform costs me $235-285 per month. I pay $35 a month for Ghost's "Publisher" plan, and I pay my friend Emmy $50/post – so $200 or $250 per month – to port each post across platforms, duplicate images and captions and footnotes and metadata and whatever else, and see that it gets out to you in a timely fashion. (Emmy's labor saves me a few precious hours per week and, just as importantly, lets me unburden myself of some administrative mental load. She's incredibly competent and lovely and I feel so lucky to have her).

To take The Auntie Bulletin "parallel platform" option out of the red, we need about 30 more readers using Ghost to upgrade to paid. I'm hoping we can all row together on this, Norwegian-football-fans-style, and by each contributing a bit, reach our destination... or win... or wherever this metaphor is going.

Thanks for considering upgrading your subscription. Thanks for being a person who lives in alignment with your values. And thank you so much for reading The Auntie Bulletin and sharing it with your friends and loved ones.

Warmly,

Lisa