Re-Introducing the Books and Tea League

Hello, my friend, and happy August!

I hope your summer (or winter) has been going well, and that you’ve been enjoying plenty of the things that make life worth living.

After a somewhat relaxed July that was filled with guests and some time off, I’ve been hard at work on my reader membership, the Books and Tea League. Doing what, you say? Well, I’ll tell you.

A little background:

When I moved the BATL to Ream in January, it was with the hope and promise that the platform would be a better fit than the system I was using at the time, which involved a third-party app to gate content hosted on my website. A very expensive third-party app.

Ream was a good solution to that problem, and, as a startup, it already offers a lot of amazing features for readers with plenty more on the radar. It’s a platform with a lot of potential.

However, there are things about the platform that haven’t been serving me or my readers well. And, as far as I can tell, those aren’t on the roadmap to be resolved anytime soon.

That’s when the dragons attacked…

In early July, there was some drama at the corporate level of Ream that caused some concerns within the author community. While the drama in itself wasn't enough to make me reconsider my hosting platform, with the change in leadership has come a shift in values that made me take note and think about how I want to structure my business for the long term.

Besides that, not long after moving to Ream, I discovered that my website hosting platform actually has a built-in capacity to host subscriptions. (Or maybe I finally got access to it, I don’t remember.) I wasn’t about to move again so soon, but I have a strong preference to host my content on a platform I control, so I had the idea that I may make that move eventually, anyway.

All of these factors combined in July to move “eventually” up to now.

What this means for you:

If this is the first time you’re reading this, it likely means you’re not already part of the Books and Tea League. And now would be a perfect time to change that. 😉

This move is, in part, a response to the reader survey I did a couple of months ago about what kind of content you want to see. I got some amazing responses that included things like behind-the-scenes posts, character profiles, and more cool content. This is content I would be excited to make for you, and am even happy to do for free to allow you to dive deeper into the worlds I’ve created in my stories… but I don’t necessarily want it to be publicly available content on this blog.

So, instead, I’ll be posting it for free behind a signup gateway. Yep, I’m going to be be doing all that cool stuff, and doing it for free. You just need to join the Books and Tea League to get access to it. Of course, if you want to get access to even more cool content, you can support me at one of the premium tiers, which would mean the world to me.

Earlier today, I posted about what you can expect in the updated version of the BATL in the community blog inside the membership. You can see that here to find out what’s coming. (You’ll be prompted to sign up for a free account after you click on that link.)

You may have already tweaked on to the fact that the BATL has had a rebranding during this process. (See those cool new avatars in my image up top? That’s part of it.)

So, the Books and Tea League has a new space, new art, and awesome new projects coming down the pipeline, and you can expect the cool bonus content you asked for at the free level.

I hope you’ll join me inside the league, my friend. We’ve got plenty of adventures in store, I promise!

With gratitude,

Talena

P. S. If you haven’t already, go here to sign up and keep the awesomeness coming:

See you on the inside!