When I started "Laura’s Birding Blog" in 2007, Blogger (owned by Google) took care of sending emails to subscribers. They discontinued that part of the service in 2021, so I started using MailChimp for that. But this month MailChimp significantly raised their rates exactly when I was working on my taxes and realizing that I'd spent way more in 2022 than my work brought in. We tried a different email service, but it had too many glitches. My work is primarily a labor of love, but there’s a limit to how much I should be asking my husband to subsidize it, and how much time and effort I can put into logistical and bureaucratic tasks rather than writing about birds and sharing my photos and experiences.
So I’m switching both my blog and its email distribution to Substack, which seems both stable and trustworthy. I’ll be keeping this site as a blog archive because most of my podcasts for the past 15 years have a link to the corresponding post here, but all new posts will be at https://lauraerickson.substack.com.
Substack allows both paid and free subscriptions. Although I will greatly appreciate every paid subscription, I do not want anyone excluded from any of my content because they can’t or don’t choose to pay. I’ve set up my account so all subscribers, paid or not, will have access to *all* of my posts.