The Future of Letters from Watson

Hello friends!

Watson’s secretary here!

I’m aware that it’s been a long while since I’ve written to all of you, and you might be wondering if Letters from Watson is ever going to run again.

I owe you a thousand apologies. I had no idea that you would be so affected.

In short - it is! Very soon in fact! But I don’t particularly want to continue using Substack. The company have shown that they are unwilling to take steps to remove extreme far right-wing hate speech from their platform, while simultaneously having ambitions to implement features which take it from being a newsletter platform (where content from individual creators can be in a silo), to a social media website. This combination makes me unwilling to stick around, or to bring more people to the platform.

I considered moving to a mailing service (Kit, Beehiiv, MailChimp etc) but unfortunately these sites all have a very different pricing model to Substack, and with the number of you there are and the volume of emails this project sends out, it would be incredibly expensive.

So, where is Letters from Watson going?

Instead, I’m going down the traditional blog route. You can now visit the Letters from Watson website, which is powered through Tumblr. So, if you have a Tumblr blog, you’ll be able to reblog and interact with the posts, and anyone can read them.

If you'd like to continue receiving emails (which, let’s face it, was half the fun), you can do so through an RSS reader. I recommend using Blogtrottr - put in the website name and your email, and you'll get an email every time this blog updates!

Little Self-Promo Section

I know all of you signed up to get amazing public domain detective stories in your inbox rather than to hear about me, but hopefully we’re well enough aquainted now for you to indulge me for just a moment!

My Sherlock Holmes game The Beekeeper’s Picnic has launched and by all accounts has been warmly received, earning spot among Kotaku’s best games of the year. I was working on the game all through LfW’s original run, and the two feel so linked to me. If you enjoy slow-paced, story-rich games, you may like it!

I’m starting a monthly newsletter focusing on creative pursuits and oddities. Since I don’t think I’m going to get tens of thousands of followers and send out hundreds of thousands of emails per year, I am doing this one as a mailing list! You can sign up here.

Well, that’s a wrap!

Thank you all once again for making this joyful thing possible, and enjoying all these adventures with me.

Best wishes,

Jabbage