Editor's Note: March 19, 2025

As we began building Words & Money, a friend of ours in the industry offered a great suggestion: be as transparent as possible. He urged us to share regular notes on our plans, our challenges, and our progress, and to give people a peek at our process. Erin and I agreed: great advice.

So, after our soft launch last week at the London Book Fair, what follows is the first in what we're planning to be a regular series of editor (and publisher) notes.

First on the agenda: our sincere thanks for an incredible reception in London.

When we started work on Words & Money in earnest on January 20, we set a goal to get the first version of the website live for the London Book Fair.  In London, we planned to take meetings and share the news of our existence—our so-called “soft” launch. Getting there was our first sprint: to set up our company, build our digital platform, define our mission, and set out a plan for growth. Mission accomplished.

We’re now at the starting line for our second sprint, which will include ramping up our editorial, refining our site, preparing and sending our first newsletters, and producing our first podcast. This sprint will take us to our official launch at the American Library Association Annual Conference, set for June 26-30, in Philadelphia.

But, as anyone who has ever started a business will tell you, even the best made plans can change. And in our case, the changes we're now discussing come for a good reason: our soft launch in London turned out to be not quite so soft!

Thanks to some very kind supporters, the news of Words & Money really took off. The number of early subscribers has greatly exceeded expectations (and continues to grow). And we are especially grateful for the large number of subscribers who are making it a point to invest in Words & Money by taking paid annual subscriptions. So, given the number of subscriptions following our soft launch in London, we’re now working to see how we might accelerate our timeline.

Still, we ask for your patience. We’re very much building the road we are traveling on, as we like to say. And while we will do our best to pick up speed where we can, we’re still in our soft launch phase and some speed bumps remain.

Rest assured, we are committed to establishing Words & Money as something that will be both worthy of your support and sustainable for the long haul. That means a lot of work in planning our editorial, and in designing, creating, and managing a lot of digital moving parts.

And we can't say it enough: thank you all for the support at this early stage. We're humbled, and grateful.

What's Next

This week, we’re working on our editorial calendar and planning feature stories, while also reporting on some very big new items. We’re getting ready to produce our first podcast pilot, and we're learning some new skills in that arena. As mentioned above, we’re doing our best to speed up the process as much as possible, but we're also doing our best to get this right.

We’re also working with our talented and patient web designer, Sam McAlilly, to address some issues with our digital platform, Ghost. To my delight, a number of commenters have remarked on the fact that we are using Ghost, with one asking whether the platform, which is powering a number of excellent upstart media ventures, was having a bit of a moment. Yes, we believe it is. We also tried out another platform called Kajabi, which was excellent, before ultimately landing on Ghost. Apologies to WordPress and Substack, which were also in the mix early.

Ghost is powerful, affordable, and, it is open source, which very much aligns with our values. But nothing's perfect, and we’re grappling with a few customization issues, some pretty basic and some a little more complicated, but nothing we can't overcome.

For example, one thing we’re trying to work around is that the Ghost template doesn’t handle bylines for contributed content well. It sounds simple, but it's a thing, and since we will be hosting a good amount of contributed pieces, we're fashioning a workaround. We're also tweaking some of the article designs. And we're also refining how we tag stories, developing a good taxonomy, an SEO plan, and we're tweaking the ability to place items where we want them on our home page. Sounds simple, I know, but it all requires time, money, and some clever coding.

Meanwhile, we're working away on our newsletter, too. After our soft launch in London, we’re now hoping to get our first newsletter out sooner than we’d originally planned. It's looking good, but again, executing the editorial while also building the product is a bit of a balancing act.

All that said, we are grateful for the positive feedback we’ve gotten on the site thus far. We very much envisioned a clean, uncluttered site where our content can live and we think we’ve got that. We’ll continue to tweak the presentation in the coming weeks. But we’re feeling very good about our initial reception, about our choice to work with Ghost, and where Words & Money is heading.

So that’s progress report #1. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email us directly at andrew@wordsandmoney.com, or erin@wordsandmoney.com.