Introducing The Pinnacle

In 2018 and 2019 I published one Pinnacle Newsletter a week, regular as clockwork, with remarkably few gaps. Last year my newsletter mojo fell off the rails and I went through multi-month periods of sending out nothing at all. This was partly due to the pandemic and all the disruption it caused, but it’s got to the point where I have to stop blaming nebulous external factors and start making solid plans again if I want my newsletter to be what it once was.

With almost 500 subscribers, and many of them contacting me each week with comments and suggestions after I sent out newsletters, I found it tremendously rewarding – and the rationale for keeping a healthy newsletter community going now is as strong as it ever was.

As a commitment to myself to start taking it seriously again, planning ahead and writing material you actually want to read, I am moving my newsletter from its current home on TinyLetter to Substack.

TinyLetter does the job, but it is also very simple and has limited scope for growth. (It has also been acquired by MailChimp, who seem to have forgotten about it.) Substack has one key benefit: because more and more writers are joining the platform, it is actively growing and being developed. While I have no plans to build a subscription-based publishing empire, it’s nice to have options.

I’ll be easing myself in gradually, but my hope is that over the coming weeks I’ll be able to resume weekly newsletters filled with interesting, useful stuff about nature, outdoor writing, and subjects relating to them. My first step will be to move my weekly ‘What I’ve been reading this week’ blog posts back onto the newsletter.

This blog will remain as active as ever, although I will be tweaking the balance of what I publish on here and what I publish on Substack.

The Pinnacle Newsletter is dead; long live The Pinnacle!

If you are already a subscriber to the Pinnacle Newsletter, there is nothing you need to do at this point. I have migrated the email list over myself, which means that when I send out my first Substack newsletter you should receive it automatically. You may receive a confirmation email from Substack indicating that you’re now subscribed, so please add the address to allowed senders in your email app. You do not need to manually subscribe to the new publication. Don’t forget that if you want to unsubscribe you will always have the option to do so; consent to receive emails from me is always optional.