Danica Swanson
@danicaswanson
Question for writers who publish subsets of their written work privately to limited groups of readers: what platforms/apps/tools do you use to manage private access to the work? Henrik Karlsson, for example, maintains two separate Substacks: one for his public essays, and a separate paywalled one where he shares his more informal writings with paid subscribers only. Some writers use Obsidian Publish and maintain two separate vaults: one public and the other password-protected. I love Obsidian so I'm leaning in this direction, but I'm still undecided. Bonus question: what do you like/dislike about your setup?
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huugo
@huugo.eth
I am not a writer, but on occasion I have pretended, so I don’t have any specific feedback for you. But, given that you use obsidian, obsidian publish seems like a good choice. 1 stop write, edit, publish. The distinct disadvantage would be — how does the group of readers get alerted that there is something new to read?
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Danica Swanson
@danicaswanson
I'm definitely leaning toward maintaining two separate vaults and using Obsidian Publish (with one vault password-protected) for the publishing. I think this is what @aviationdoctor.eth has been doing recently. There will be fixed costs for Obsidian Publish ($8 per site * 2 = $16/mo) but the ease of the write-edit-publish process and the fact that my files will all be maintained locally in markdown format are big selling points for me. It would be free to publish on Substack, but doing so would also entail a level of platform risk I don't want to take again. (I've already been burned that way elesewhere. Many times). And Paragraph doesn't offer token gating any longer, so that's out. As for alerts of new work: hmm... well, right now I'm co-stewarding an invite-only group chat in DCs, so I could alert some of my readers that way. But I'm not sure how many people read those notifs regularly, or how appropriate it would be to do that. Plus, sending new post alerts that way requires another step from me; I'd much rather automate the notifications. So I'll definitely need to think more about how to manage private access for other readers. In any event, thanks for helping me think this through. (Also, I must say... from what I've seen of your work here, you write extremely well for someone who doesn't self-identify as a writer!)
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