An Explanation (Which I Would Be Very Grateful If You Took The Time To Read)

Nov 22, 2025

What follows is a minor modern horror story. I say minor, because the modern world is not short of horror stories, and, in the grand scheme of things, this belongs to the small leagues. But it’s been frightening and upsetting for me, especially on the back of a brutal 12 months in the publishing industry.

Two weeks into August this year I moved my newsletter from Substack to the Ghost platform, where it now resides under the website address I’ve been using for many, many years, www.tom-cox.com. I had various reasons for doing this, which I’ve explained many times, but that’s not what this post is about.

When I moved all my Substack writing to my own website, I also migrated all my Substack subscribers: both the paying and non-paying ones. I tries, as best I could, through what I worried was tedious repetition, to let everyone know, via Substack, that I was doing this. The newsletter has remained just the same. Since making the move - as you’ll see here from a quick look around - I’ve written just as frequently, probably a little more so. One of the reasons I made the move is that I wanted to put my actual work and being read ahead of growth, and make my writing accessible to more of the people who actually did want to read it. Therefore, while keeping the original subscription rate active, I added two cheaper ones, for people who wanted to read everything I posted but couldn’t previously afford to.

I knew I’d miss the community element of Substack, which I had enjoyed. I suspected, also, that I’d experience a drop in subscribers, and in income. All of these things happened, fairly quickly, and I accepted it and was at peace with my decision.

But then something else happened I hadn’t expected.

When my paying Substack subscribers’ subscriptions autorenewed, some of them began to contact their bank and flag the payment as fraud. This meant that I received an email from Stripe, each time, saying that someone had initiated a payment dispute against me. What this means is that the subscription fee is refunded to the subscriber by Stripe, with me footing the bill for all of it (i.e. not just for the portion of it that I received, but the percentage that was paid to Stripe and the platform I was using). On top of this, the writer incurs a startlingly large penalty fee. If the writer chooses to counter the dispute and loses (and, as I found out early on, the writer always loses these disputes) they receive another penalty fee on top of that. It’s a hugely expensive process.

And then the same thing began to happen again. And again. And again.

And then something even worse happened: some people’s banks (thankfully not all) began to automatically flag these payments and stop them going through (I’m not sure why, but I’m assuming it’s as a result of these previous refunds/disputes).

It got worse, and worse. To the extent that, this month, I couldn’t afford to pay my rent without going into some savings I was trying desperately not to touch. I started to get truly scared about the impact it was having on my livelihood. Particular since it had happened in the same year that my ex-publishers, Unbound, had gone into administration, taking over £20,000 of unpaid earnings from my books to hell with them.

I was baffled. I always understand when someone unsubscribes from my work - we are in a cost of living crisis, people’s financial circumstances change, plus everyone is overwhelmed, and there are sometimes just too many artists asking for support - but I couldn’t seem to explain why it was happening so often, and why people were doing it in this brutal, heavily penalising fashion. I was still working extremely hard, even through a bout of ill health that put me in hospital twice during late summer, still sending the newsletter regularly, and had explained several times that the subscription had carried over from Substack, worked in just the same way, and outlined what people needed to do if they wanted to cancel their subscription (or upgrade or downgrade it): that they just needed to use the email address they’d used to subscribe to Substack to log in to www.tom-cox.com. Why weren’t the people who were unsubscribing at least emailing me (admittedly a few did) before going straight to their bank and claiming the payments were unauthorised?

I decided I’d made a mistake. Not in moving from Substack, but in deleting my Substack profile so quickly. I should have left my page up, so there was more information out there about my move. I admit that was rash of me, motivated by an increasing, overwhelming desire for simplicity in my life and one less app to deal with.

But this week, due to a few conversations with subscribers, I had a far more significant realisation:

When I migrated my subscribers from Substack, I assumed that every one of them would then receive the newsletters I was sending (via the Ghost platform) from my website. What I did not realise was that all the people who’d subscribed here on Substack but had clicked the “read in app only” option instead of opting to receive my writing via email had NOT been getting my newsletters. None of them. That’s a scarily large number of people. People who, if they hadn’t used a search engine to find my site, or seen my posts on Substack in August announcing my move, might, quite reasonably, have believed I’d stopped writing.

This is why I am here, now.

I’m sticking by my decision, at least for the foreseeable future: I’m still going to send out my newsletter from www.tom-cox.com. I’m still going to operate my paid subscription service from that, and that’s where my writing is going to be. And I’m going to continue to offer those two less expensive options which enable people to read all of it. But I’m going to have this page here too. I’m not going to connect it to Stripe and go back to offering paid Substack subscriptions. But I am going to try to at least use this space to keep people informed of new pieces of writing. I might even use Substack Notes semi-regularly. We shall see.

I’m sorry if this is a boring post for anyone to read, but it’s a matter of survival for me, at the end of a year that’s jeopardised my livelihood in two vast, unexpected ways, and it’s important it reaches everyone who has not seen my work since the first half of August. It’s also an example of the unfortunate ways that technology - by making the world into far more of a tangled migraine than it should be - can have a major, frightening impact on an income a creative person had relied on, without that creative person doing anything wrong, other than and trying to find a fairer, more independent way of getting their work out there (albeit being a tad hasty in the process and not asking enough questions), and not being brilliantly technologically literate,

So, if you would like to a) read what you might have missed, b) become a paying subscriber who has access to all of my work for a minimum of £20 per year, or c) alter your existing subscription in any way, please head over to www.tom-cox.com and log in with the email you used when you subscribed here on Substack (you’ll be sent a message with a secure log-in link and that will open your account).

If you are a paying subscriber, or think you still are one, I’d also appreciate it if you could check your bank has not stopped any payments (and that your debit/credit card details are up to date).

If you are a paying subscriber who clicked “in app only” but would like to start receiving the newsletter emails, please feel free to contact me via the contact form on my site, and I’ll do my best to sort this for you.

For those who’d rather not receive emails, I won’t spam you; I’ll simply try to keep this page up to date so you can see links to my new writing that way and drop in whenever you feel like it. But emails from me will not come via Substack.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this.

Tom

P.S. I also have a new novel out since I last spoke to some of you.

Just a few of the bits from me you might have missed:

https://www.tom-cox.com/nothing-cold-can-stay-a-november-compendium/

https://www.tom-cox.com/lillian/

https://www.tom-cox.com/halloween/

https://www.tom-cox.com/fungal-misadventure-some-new-stories-and-a-poem/

https://www.tom-cox.com/autumn-diary/

https://www.tom-cox.com/richards-existential-diary/

https://www.tom-cox.com/some-thoughts-about-jims-scarecrows-and-books/

https://www.tom-cox.com/my-ex-husbands-landlady-2/