New Year, new platform - Reading the Past is now also on Substack

Best wishes for a good upcoming year, as well as great reading to all of you for 2026! Thanks for following my posts. I always enjoy hearing from everyone, so please feel free to comment or reply with your own thoughts and reading recommendations.

For the last few months, I’ve been pondering the future of Reading the Past and where I’d like to take it. While I appreciate that the platform has been free, the Blogspot/Blogger interface has become antiquated and limiting. I haven’t been able to update the layout for years without risking the loss of important content. It’s not mobile-friendly, and it takes messing with HTML to get pictures and text to center correctly. I’m also under no illusion that Google will keep Blogger around forever. In addition, the Mailchimp software I use for email subscribers, which stopped being free around a year after I adopted it, is functional, but more cumbersome than it needs to be for admins.

About a year ago, I opened an account at Substack since many of my email subscriptions were on that platform, and I wanted to keep track of them all. I claimed a domain there since it asked me for a name, but I didn’t do anything as far as publishing on Substack. Until I had some downtime over the recent holiday break and got to exploring the options a little further. Before, the idea of migrating to a new platform, maybe paying $$$ for a redesign, had been daunting… but according to their Help files, Substack could automate the migration from Blogger.

So I tried it, and within a few hours, most of my 1,969 posts, covering the past twenty years, were copied over to Substack. (All but 53 of them. I don’t know which 53 are missing, which will haunt me, but I’ll learn to live with it.) I love the colorful new layout and its ease of use for subscriber management, and I’m getting familiar with the posting process.

My posts, now on Substack

 

The plan is for my Substack to act as a mirror of the Blogger version of Reading the Past going forward, so if you subscribe via email, you now have options. If you prefer to stick with your current newsletter format, you’re good. It isn’t going away. But if you’d prefer to move to Substack, you can unsubscribe from this site (I won’t judge you) and sign up there at:

https://readingthepast.substack.com

 
If you’re already subscribed to Reading the Past on Substack, even though there wasn’t much to look at until a few days ago, thank you! For those currently subscribed to both, you'll probably want to unsub from one or the other since, apart from the post you’re reading now, you’ll get duplicate content in your inbox if you don’t. Either way, my posts will remain free to read.

Thanks again for reading, and wherever you plan to join me, I’m glad you’re here and look forward to sharing more reviews and historical fiction news in the coming year.