On Thursday 28 August, 2026, I left Substack, after four and a half years of operating The Art of Enchantment there. Now that we have our new home here, powered by beehiiv, I wanted to extract for those of you who are interested the relevant portion of my ‘resignation speech’ which was my final post on the dreaded stack.

This probably won’t be surprising to many of you, but I’ve decided to move my long-standing publication, The Art of Enchantment, off Substack. (If you are surprised, you can exactly read why I’m jumping ship in the section at the end of this missive. I hope you’ll find it illuminating.) So in future, I’ll be operating independently – as I did for almost twenty years before bringing my work to the Substack platform in 2022 – under my own domain, which will host a dedicated place for my writing and teaching with, excitingly, a new built-in community forum as well as my newsletter. As well as furnishing an escape from all-consuming apps and evil algorithms, the change offers some exciting new opportunities, so I promise that this move will be an upgrade for you all!

First: full recognition that being on Substack has been valuable in many ways, and I’m glad that I transferred ‘The Art of Enchantment’ blog and email list over here in early 2022. I was a dedicated cheerleader for Substack at the time, and all of the ways in which it enabled authors to be paid for our writing and related work. As well as offering a good platform for reaching readers, Substack was an excellent way to meet other writers, and I’ve made some new friends here as well as some delightful colleagues and occasional collaborators.

But that’s just not happening any more and hasn’t been for ages: there’s too much noise. Too many people are now treating Notes like Twitter, when originally it used to be a place for proper conversations and connections. If I wanted to waste my life scrolling through random bits of trivia and throwaway opinions, I might as well go back to Facebook. But that, along with the seeming inevitability these days of rabid pile-ons (very much happening here on Substack, too – remember the disgraceful hounding of Glennon Doyle off the platform, last year?) is precisely why I left social media in the first place and came here. Yet I have no choice now but to scroll through an infinite amount of all this nonsense if I want to try to explore new writing or find really good stuff I might have missed. So I don’t. Which – even though occasionally I do happen across gems in spite of all the odds stacked against it – is a great pity, and not what I signed up for at all.

In the early days, Substack promised always to be devoted to long-form writing, and promised, in full-on, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die fashion, to be a haven for such writers so that we didn’t have to depend on the ever-shifting whims of social media, and the associated algorithms which were increasingly working against most of us. Like Our Andy on the streets of Makerfield, they were For Us. There was also the potential – if what you offered was serious content that provided genuine value to readers, of course – for good growth through good discoverability, which justified their exceptionally high 10% revenue share. (Yes, Substack does indeed take 10% of all our earnings, and then of course there are transaction fees – a minimum of 3% and often more – on top.)

And in that once-brave new world, the Substack model was founded on writers having a meaningful relationship with their audience too, through direct-to-inbox emails. Just like the proper newsletter lists we’d all grown up with – which is why those of us with healthily sized lists we’d already spent years/decades building up and couldn’t afford to lose, thought we’d be safe coming over. We weren’t. Nowadays, you can be actively subscribed to a writer on Substack and not only choose never to receive a single email from them, but also never even see a single one of their articles on the website or in the app. People here who have emails disabled can be subscribed to dozens of publications, with articles they can’t possibly be finding the time to read piling up, invisibly lurking in the ‘subscriptions’ tab on their Substack profile page.

Every single week now I get emails from people who have subscribed to me but can’t find my stuff because their Substack account is somehow on some ‘read in the app’ setting which means they don’t receive any emails at all. And so they have absolutely no idea where everything they’ve paid for is, that there’s a ‘home page’ for The Art of Enchantment they can explore, or that there’s a vast archive of material they can access – or indeed, anything useful at all. And there’s close to zero support for them, except for a particularly feeble-minded little chatbot which regularly pushes out the wrong information while giving the impression of being very pleased with its own recalcitrance. And as someone who feels a strong sense of responsibility to people who pay for my work, it makes me really quite cross that my readers can’t find an obvious way to access what they’ve paid for, and above all that I can’t do anything about it. It’s my work and these are my readers and subscribers, but Substack has all the power, all the control, sets all the terms.

Now for clarity, it is absolutely the prerogative of people who don’t want teeming inboxes not to have them, but it’s worth pointing out that this situation is incredibly depressing for writers. I would never have signed up for this if it had been the offer when I brought my longstanding Mailchimp list of 23,000 subscribers over to Substack in 2022. Professional authors write to be read, and we want to engage with our readers, and most of us will gladly take a lower subscriber count if those subscribers do actually want to hear from us and engage with us. I want that connection, and one that deepens over time, and I always have. That’s why I’ve been writing on the web for a full twenty years now – from the very early days of blogs and social media.

Unfortunately, Substack now functions exactly like one of those algorithm-driven social media entities that they once promised faithfully never to become. It’s the Machine personified. There’s been a really hard pivot to the app and Notes. As well as my approx. 61,000 subscribers, I now have an additional 22,000+ ‘followers’ who will only ever (though only ever sometimes) see my Notes rather than read my articles. But I don’t use Notes very much: I’m a writer who wants to actually write. And if you show interest in our work but only ‘follow’ us, then when we leave, just like when we leave Instagram or X, we can’t take you with us. You’ll never see us again. And that’s the exact opposite of what Substack once repeatedly promised us.

Substack also repeatedly promised writers that ads would never become a part of the platform. But guess what? In December last year they rolled back on that promise too. Ads are coming there, like it or not.

It’s worth adding that, for most writers – especially those of us who’ve been around for a long while – Substack growth is now largely dead, and huge numbers are seeing their subscriber count and associated income plummet. That’s because at some point early last year, Substack very significantly changed the platform and shifted the algorithm, and as a consequence, those of us on whose work and standing they built their success and who had been working really, really hard here suddenly had our visibility and discoverability taken away. (Loyalty’s all very passé now, it seems ...) But when we attempt to express our concerns to Substack about this, they show no interest at all. They simply don’t care. While taking 10% of our income anyway.

Until we wake up one morning and finally say no.

BUT – and as if all this wasn’t enough! – for me there’s been a VERY large final straw, and that’s the fact that Substack is now ethically compromised in ways I can’t tolerate. I refuse to have my name associated with a platform which, in spite of so much criticism for it, still offers visibility to Neo-Nazis, human traffickers and rapists, and is completely blasé about/ provides absolutely zero oversight of hate speech and misogyny. ‘Standing up for free speech’ (which is what the Substack founders keep insisting on repeat that they’re doing) sounds very principled and all that – but there’s a very, very big difference between believing theoretically in people’s rights to express their fucked-up opinions and actively providing them with a platform on which to do it. And then taking their money! – so profiting from it. But when many of us – including those of us with big followings here who’ve been around for years – reached out to them recently with very serious concerns about the appearance of Andrew Tate on Substack – a man whose active and dangerous misogyny is known around the world, and who is banned from all the major social media platforms, including Meta, TikTok and YouTube – except Twitter, predictably; he’s Elon’s kind of guy – they completely ignored us. Zero response. How dare you question the will of the gods. The boys, the bros, the Tech Lords.

Ach well – hacked-off elder woman alert – been there, done that. My #tiredofthisshit t-shirt is threadbare. And so, guys, if you treat with utter contempt the people you’ve formerly depended on for your success, sooner or later you’re going to find out that isn’t very good business sense. Because now, Substack is far from the only game in town. (Yes, I know that losing just my 10% isn’t going to pain Substack in the slightest. But there’s a big wave coming …) For clarity, there’s no moral ambiguity here: Tate is facing criminal charges in three different countries. In the UK alone he’s wanted for dozens of different charges of rape, actual bodily harm, arranging or facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation, controlling prostitution for gain – along with offences relating to indecent images of a child, FFS, and ‘extreme pornography’. He’s still highly active on the Substack platform. A million men who follow Andrew Tate and buy into his ‘worldview’ are probably running around Substack now, poisoning the groundwater. And although it’s not Tate’s most profitable platform, Substack is nevertheless both silently condoning and making money from his violent and dangerous rhetoric. So, as of now, they don’t get to take my money too.

Yes – I am furious, frankly, at the way this has turned out. Furious that I brought my name and reputation and existing email list to Substack and that I’ve encouraged my followers – including the many I’ve had since very long before Substack was even dreamed of – to adopt and fund this platform. And angry that we’ve all been let down in these ways. It no longer feels safe to me, let alone ethical, to be so deeply financially invested in Substack.

That all sounds very negative, I know – but I promise you that this shift from Substack is not negative at all. It’s a genuine positive. It’s happening precisely because I love what I do, and I’m so glad to be operating independently again now, with full control of my own work – and most importantly, I’m excited to be able to be more creative about what I offer you and how. I’m no longer in service to anyone else’s increasingly dubious vision. Friends who have made the transition (and thank you, Elise Loehnen, for your support and encouragement with all this) have no regrets and are delighted with the support from the beehiiv team as well as the greater independence and functionality. When the move’s finally made, it feels as if a burden has been lifted off us. And that matters. Integrity matters.

The Art of Enchantment comprises a significant chunk of my livelihood, and this was absolutely not a decision I made lightly: it’s highly likely that I’ll lose subscribers and income in making the switch. But you have, again and again and then again, to stand for something in this life, and I can’t in good conscience continue to hand over 10% of my income to the people who own Substack and are choosing to move it in this direction. I just don’t trust it any more. No platform is perfect, but at least beehiiv has no algorithm, no control of or interference in anything I do or any subscribers I have – and it has no grubby political bathwater that we all have no choice but to swim in – which makes me very happy and relieved. It’s all down to me again now, and to you. And I do also genuinely believe that the new features that are available to me will result in an even better experience for you all. So let’s dance.

Over the past four and a half years, I’ve invested a lot in this platform and the community I originally brought here and have since grown here, so my withdrawal will naturally be carefully managed. The Art of Enchantment page and archive will remain here for a while, because it’ll take a while for the new site to take priority in search results on Google, and I do of course want people to find their way to me. I worry especially about those subscribers who are able here to choose not to receive emails from me and so might be oblivious to all this for ages, then wake up one day and wonder where I’ve gone! But after this post has landed, wherever it might land for you, no one will be able to take out a paid subscription on Substack and there won’t be any new content at all; all the action will take place at the new location, theartofenchantment.org, and most importantly in your email inboxes, without you needing to lift a finger. I’ll post an occasional Note here with information about what we’re doing over there (if Substack wants this to be a social media site, then as my parting gift I’ll finally use it like one) since I’d like to find a way to reach those additional 22,000+ followers too. And I’ll retain my personal Substack account because there are still friends and writers here who I want to keep reading.

I really do hope you’ll all continue to walk with me on this new adventure. It certainly doesn’t require any of you to agree with me, or to follow my lead and leave Substack – or indeed, to do anything at all. This is a very personal ethical choice for me, but you will of course make your own equally valid choices, and will never be judged by me for doing so. Keep your Substack account for everything else you’re reading and you’ll still receive new writing from me as always – and the only thing that will change is that you’ll actually receive more, and you’ll actually see it. And if you head over to my new website and snuffle and scrape around a bit, I promise you that everything is seamlessly integrated and all in one place, so you can easily find access to all the material you’re signed up for. New offerings will come to you by email so you won’t miss anything at all (though if you don’t like reading emails you will of course still easily be able to click through and read them on the website, which I certainly find much nicer). And those of you who’ve been around for a long time know that I won’t take advantage of your presence there. I’ll never take your interest and attention for granted.

Onwards! And if you have any questions or concerns, please do leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them all. I’d be especially grateful if you’d leave a comment about what you would like to see from me in future, or let me know if there’s anything you find frustrating – or anything else you’d like to share. The Art of Enchantment obviously wouldn’t exist without you readers and supporters. And I want this new, late chapter in its life – like mine – to be the best yet.