I've moved my newsletter to Substack!

Here's what's in store...

Hello!

You’re either seeing this newsletter because you opted-in through one of my previous Kickstarter campaigns or you saw me posting about it on Twitter and Facebook.

Either way: hello and welcome :)

TLDR: Don’t want to read all about my newsletter? Just want to get started? No probs! Just hit the button and you’ll start getting my comic, book and video game writing updates every other Friday:

Want to know more: Then read on to see all the brilliant things you’ll get if you subscribe to my free Substack.

1. What will my new newsletter include?

Substack is a pretty neat platform that les you do a lot of neat stuff. I’ll be posting a regular newsletters on all my creative writing projects every other Friday. If that’s too often for your inbox, feel free to unsubscribe if you like, I totally get it and won’t mind - we can only handle so much each day before our brains start to melt, after all!

The Friday updates are alway free, but if you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription, you can help support my writing and get a bonus, exclusive update each week for just £3.50 a month.

The paid subscriber updates will include deeper dives into my writing process, script-to-page examples, scriptwriting tutorials, Kickstarter how-to guides, video blogs, podcast shorts and more. Here’s a full list of the extras you get with a paid subscription.

Every other Friday, my free newsletter will include things like:

• New art drops from the comics I’m working on

• Updates on all my current comics - Killtopia, BPM: Beatdowns Per Minute, Deadliner, Ninja Baseball Spirits, Bust and more.

• Updates on the Killtopia animated TV show, which animation studio Voltaku is currently hard at work on in Unreal Engine

• Announcements on new comic projects (there’s a lot of exciting stuff in the works you won’t want to miss!)

• Exclusive discounts and updates for my online comic store - which you can check out here

• Updates on my video game history books, including the upcoming second printing of my beat ‘em up book, Go Straight (releasing August via Bitmap Books) and my new book about the history of the run ‘n’ gun shooter genre (which will have a publisher announcement soon)

• Details on my game journalism for quarterly gaming journal Lock.On, starting with my upcoming 7000 word feature on the history of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, from comics, to TV, to toys, to video games. It has interviews with Kevin Eastman, Tribute Games and Digital Eclipse. My second feature for them is even bigger and focused on the making of a classic, original PlayStation franchise (so stay tuned!)

Sound good?

Then you can hit the button to either subscribe for free or upgrade to the £3.50 a month paid tier (the first week’s free if you want to try it out first!)

Also, thanks to Substack, there will be new (and flashy) stuff I couldn’t do before on Mailchimp, which you can check out below…

2. Why Substack?

Twitter has always been my main way of letting my readers and followers know about what I’m working on - from my comics, game history books, video game scripts and game journalism.

The site has become really tricky when it comes to standing out in the crowd. I have over 7000 followers now and lately most of my comic related posts get anything from 5-30 likes and a tiny amount of views.

This is because ‘someone’ (we know who) has made it so only people with paid blue ticks get seen, unless you pay for Twitter ads (which in my experience are hit and miss).

In short and based on my years of digital marketing experience, the Twitter algorithm has become like Facebook, in that when you repeat the same words and links a lot (for example, the name of my main comic series Killtopia, or links to Kickstarter) - the platforms know that you’re promoting something and your posts start to get suppressed (because they want you to buy ads to promote stuff).

Substack gives me a way to keep in touch with you all - to let you know about my new projects, upcoming releases, new crowdfunding campaigns and more. I’ll even be offering subscriber discounts and other neat things down the road (watch this space)

3. New stuff + Exclusives + Paid tiers

Substack has a lot of really nice tools, such as a podcast feature, which lets me do simple voice notes and video blogs - so over time I’ll run a few polls with you all to see what sort of stuff you’d like me to chat about (and if you don’t, no worries, I want to make sure you get good stuff out of your subscription)

The last poll I ran before switching to Substack asked my subscribers what they’d like to see in the collected edition of my main comic series, Killtopia. It had a huge response, and really helped me see that my subscribers wanted to see more of. That approach will definitely continue, as I want my Substack to be fun and useful for you.

4. Interested? Not interested?

If not, then honestly don’t worry. I mean it when I say that I understand what it’s like to be bombarded with emails from lots of brands and people every day - so if these once a week updates feel like too much, then please do unsubscribe. I absolutely get it!

If you would like to subscribe, then you have my absolute thanks, and hit the button below:

Let’s have fun with this. Have a great day everyone :)

Dave

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