EDITH updates, v7

The to-do list ballooned this week, so after some housekeeping concerns, we’ll pivot to championing two people doing interesting things online: 

  • Are you experiencing trouble with the listing wizard rejecting ISBNs? We’ve heard one such report, and are eager to know if there are others.
  • We are seeking recommendations for a good newsletter service. Please note: By this we specifically mean not Mailchimp. I’ve worked with Mailchimp plenty, and in many ways sticking with it would be easiest, but it’s a mediocre product, and poised to get worse now that Mailchimp has been acquired by Intuit. Intuit runs QuickBooks, and here’s a fun fact about QuickBooks as it pertains to EDITH: We took out a small QuickBooks Capital loan to help finance aspects of the site build. And every month we receive an email from them announcing “Everything’s on track for your upcoming loan payment” several hours after they’ve auto-debited said payment from my account. Something about that strikes me as deeply cynical, or perhaps it’s merely sloppy, and maybe that’s a distinction without a difference.
  • We’re intrigued by The Study Newsletter, compiled by Ivaylo Durmonski, a fellow writing from Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Durmonski is a voracious reader, and his newsletter is essentially a biweekly ode to learning and sharing. He always had tidbits on historical figures—Emmy Noetherfeatured recently—and while we read it wanting badly to edit it, we love his earnest enthusiasm, and it seems to be catching on. Recently he announced it took him three years to accumulate 1000 subscribers and less than six months to grow that number to nearly 3000.

Thanks for following along. We’ll leave you with a snapshot taken at a charity thrift shop near Tucson, Arizona, the day after Christmas in 2013. How many things had to go wrong—or right—to create this book? The question haunts and inspires us in equal measure.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.