A new newsletter, blog, and community for Valley Press

We are live on "Substack", and there's a little explaining to do

The Valley Press newsletter has a new home, and it’s now doubling as a blog and, to some extent, a community for our authors, readers and followers. If you’re reading this in your inbox, the transition has obviously worked – phew!

Blogs need titles, of course, and rather than sending you all to sleep with “the Valley Press Blog”, or similar, I’ve christened it By the Book: Jamie McGarry at Valley Press. The first part is just a neat off-the-shelf (sorry) pun that wasn’t in use, but there’s real meaning in the subtitle: this will be a blog for me as well as the business, and you’ll be hearing from and about both, far more regularly than you have before.

There’s another wrinkle to this that I should briefly explain: the new platform, Substack, allows writers to produce a mix of “free” and “premium” posts, which I expect to produce in a ratio of about 5:1. The free posts will include anything intended to promote VP books, and stuff I’m just writing for my own pleasure; the premium posts will include practical “how to” articles on aspects of publishing, and some in-depth data from behind the scenes at VP.

To access the premium posts will set you back £3.50 a month (or £35 for the year), and though I hope those extra posts will be fascinating/useful enough to justify the cost, the subscription is also an easy way for those of you who can afford it to support our work; particularly those who simply don’t have the time to read the constant stream of new books we are producing.

As for why we’re worth supporting, you can find a reminder of the pledges I made late last year – in service of inclusivity, fairness, transparency and sustainability – on the “about” page for the new blog, worth a look if you have time to read two posts. (Details of the paid subscription should be there too, if interested.)

As a final note (not lingering today!), I have always had huge admiration for what they’re trying to do on this platform, but I’m here now because it has finally become an essential move rather than simply a “nice thought”. To give you an insight into what I mean, here’s Substack’s co-founder Hamish McKenzie on the recent clamour around the “Threads” app:

“The world doesn’t need yet another social network, but it does need, and deserves, a better media system based on a different model with different rules. This is what we’re up to with Substack – not just creating a publishing network for writers (although that’s an important part of it), but building an entirely new system from the ground up. It’s a long project, but we hope the effects will be enduring.”

So, a platform well worth checking out for any writers who might be reading this (about 2,000 of you last I checked!) Thanks for making the jump with me, and I look forward to being in touch with you again soon.