Welcome To Our New (Second) Home
Hello, friends!
After six wonderful years at Patreon, we are officially moving our paid community to Substack. It is a huge privilege to be able to make choices that better equip us to carry out our mission and keep us creatively invigorated, and that is exactly what we believe this move will do for Coffee + Crumbs.
There are a lot of reasons behind this decision, but here are the highlights:
We want to simplify and consolidate the number of platforms we’re using.
We want to be financially viable.
We want to invest more time and energy into our paid community through a platform the entire C+C team can use and access easily.
The more we use Substack, the more we love it. Here are some of the features we’re excited about:
Better user experience.
Substack is built for writers, and we’d love to offer more writing to our paid supporters.
Our newsletter archives can live somewhere permanent, yay!
Better potential for organic growth.
Better environment for our community to connect with one another.
Ability for you (and us!) to “gift” memberships
We’re also thrilled to be moving to Substack in light of some big changes we are making at Coffee + Crumbs. After eight and a half years of publishing new, original essays about motherhood on a weekly basis, we are switching to a quarterly model in 2023. Instead of publishing essays three times a week, we’re going to be publishing larger collections a few times a year.
Our hope in switching to a quarterly model is that you will have more space and more time to curl up with our stories, instead of feeling like our essays are on a constant conveyor belt where it’s easy to miss stuff and fall behind. Every time we publish a collection, you’ll have a few months to read through the stories, whenever it works for you.
On the writing side, this shift is also going to give us more time with our stories. Internally, we’re looking at this as an opportunity to elevate our writing, and deepen our craft.
Our first collection will go live on March 1st at Coffee + Crumbs. As always, these stories will be entirely free to read—in a beautiful and calm environment void of ads.
We’re viewing this new Substack as a second home of sorts, a place where we can publish writing outside of our quarterly collections—like our Love After Babies series, bonus essays, and our new Dear Mothers column.
We also plan to use this space to nurture and foster community away from social media, something many readers and listeners have asked for. If you haven’t downloaded the Substack app, we can’t say enough good things about it!
We hope you’ll consider joining us here, either as a free (or, even better 😉) paid subscriber.
What to do now, if you’re currently a Patron:
Unfortunately, this is not an automated process. We cannot force you to sign up for Substack, nor can we end your membership at Patreon.
If you’d like to move your support to Substack, sign up here:
Then cancel your Patreon membership. That’s it! That’s all you have to do.
If you’d rather keep supporting us via Patreon, you are more than welcome to—we’re not deactivating our Patreon account due to the large archive of posts there. But moving forward, all bonus content and incentives, will be published here on Substack.
What to do now, if you’re *not* a Patron:
If you’d like to help keep Coffee + Crumbs up and running, you can sign up to support us here:
That’s it! Easy peasy. And thank you!
As always, we do not take it lightly that all of the work we do at C+C is funded by our own community. We are forever humbled to be supported by a gracious audience who still believes in, and desires, slow art—especially in the motherhood space.
The generous support you provide Coffee + Crumbs funds every facet of our work. Your dollars help pay our writers, keep our website up and running, produce our podcast, and so, so much more. We are incredibly passionate about keeping C+C an ad-free space, because we believe mothers deserve a calm, serene space on the Internet to read stories, connect with one another, and be encouraged.
Your support makes this possible. Your support allows us to keep dreaming. Your support provides vast amounts of creative freedom for us to pursue excellence in our work. Your support enables us to help mothers feel safe, known, encouraged and loved through the power of storytelling.
Your support is not a small thing. It’s not a small thing to us, and it’s not a small thing to the thousands of women who are impacted by this work.
Thank you for helping make every single thing we do possible. Thank you for letting us pursue slow art, time and time again. We love creating for you. ❤️
Love,
Ashlee and the Coffee + Crumbs team
So thankful for your care and thoughtful leadership in this space, Ash!
So excited to have C+C move to substack! It's already been easier to connect with other writer friends and have their word easily accessible. If I'm already a patreon subscriber, will my membership automatically be applied towards the paid C+C substack? If not, will we get an email letting us know what we need to do? Thanks!