Want to support Brutal South?

For $5/month, you can show your support for this weird weekly labor of love

I’ve opened up paid subscriptions to Brutal South. If you enjoy reading the newsletter and would like to chip in, you can now set up automatic monthly payments ($5) or annual payments ($55) to support the work I’m doing. Click here to get started.

The Wednesday weekly newsletter will still be free, but paying subscribers get a few perks, including:

• Occasional members-only posts, audio content, and discussion threads

• The ability to comment on posts (please be nice, y’all)

• Access to the full archive, including any members-only content I publish going forward

I started this newsletter with vague guidelines and no ambitions beyond publishing something new every week. It has turned out to be one of my favorite projects, a labor of love that rarely feels like a burden. I am so grateful to all of you who signed up and wrote kind notes and spread the word these last few months.

Still. It takes time. I’m up late a lot of nights writing after my kids go to bed, and I have to squeeze the rest of my writing and research into lunch breaks. If there’s one thing I learned from my past life as a newspaper reporter, it’s that Doing What You Love is still work.

Now you can support that work! I’ll try to cover the basics below, but feel free to respond to this email if you have any other questions.

What’s Substack?

It’s a blogging and email newsletter platform that makes it easy for me to communicate directly with readers on a mailing list. It also makes it easy to process electronic payments via Stripe (see below). It was free for me to sign up, but they’ll take a processing fee (that’s included in your $5 or $55 rate) once I start accepting payments.

I did my research, and I like this company’s approach. I like that they don’t sell advertising. I like being able to circumvent social media and Google Search, which are notoriously fickle and have been draining profits from the news industry for years.

If you want to read more about the revenue model, Vicki Boykis wrote a helpful post about monetizing her Normcore Tech newsletter that convinced me this whole thing might be worth trying. 

What’s Stripe?

It’s an online payment processing company, kind of like Paypal. They do business all over the world, and they’ve been around since 2010 without any major security breaches. Nothing is foolproof, but Stripe is as secure and dependable of a payment system as you can find.

What are you going to spend all that money on?

Groceries, mostly. Seriously, my children eat so much fish.

What if I can’t afford it?

Hey, I understand. If you still want to help out, tell all your friends about the newsletter. Share it on Facebook; tweet the links at your Congressman; forward it to your friends — heck, forward it to your enemies!