Here's an idea...
So, I’ve long felt that of all my newsletters, this is the one I want to update the most often. I have the most subscribers here, paid and free, and True Crime Report probably gets the best traffic.
But no one wants a daily barrage of newsletters. I don’t. I only barely keep up with the subscriptions I do have. Also, I’ve always thought a true crime news site, in particular, merits daily or almost daily attention. That would’ve been impossible in the first six months of this year due to feeling so profoundly depressed after my mom’s death that even two prescription antidepressants weren’t helping the way they did before.
I feel like doing more lately, and more tellingly, I’ve been reading true crime and crime-related literature again. I recently finished Ann Burgess’s A Killer By Design about her role in creating the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. I’ve also got several books I’m reading for research and curiosity. To be clear, I haven’t read much true crime at all in recent years, save works by friends like
(Sarah Weinman).I was dithering over how to write more often, including covering new or breaking stories, because I didn’t know you could publish on Substack without emailing. It turns out you can. That’s a game-changer for me.
Here’s the plan, and like so many of my plans—because even at 55, I don’t know how not to be mercurial—it is subject to tweaking or wholesale changes:
I’ll update truecrimereport.net more regularly and cover current and historical stories that fascinate me.
However, I won’t send email newsletters more than once a day, tops. If it’s a slow week, one digest at the end of the week.
Basically: I’m treating this more like a website or (god forbid!) a blog.
This will also help me determine when some comments might be appropriate for a paywall. I’ve long been somewhat opposed to paywalls and haven’t even changed my opinion that much, but at the same time, if I’m putting more work in here, I can’t, at this stage of my writing career, conscience doing it all for free all the time.
It feels silly to admit I didn’t know you could use Substack that way, but I’ve Googled around enough to see that I wasn’t the only one who thought “newsletter” was so specific that Substackers were locked into that function alone.
Look for newsletters in your inbox, but check TrueCrimeReport.net as well.
And thank you for subscribing, regardless of whether it’s a paid or free subscription.