We’re making changes to NOLA History Guy Substack and Patreon
The original Church of St. Louis in New Orleans. It was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1788.
Changes to our Substack and Patreon
Comus costume sketch, 1909
We’ve been sharing NOLA History Guy content to other platforms for some time. Going on Patreon was a fun exercise in WordPress configuration, because there’s a plugin that connects the sites. One of the features of the plugin I particularly like is that it allows access to the “paid” portion of a post to a level it calls “any patron.” That means someone can sign up for NHG on Patreon, pay a dollar for one month, drop the payments, and still be listed as a “patron.” I just love that! It means teachers in particular can get easy access to all the content. (I’ve also said that, if you’re a teacher and you’ve ponied up a dollar or more, come buy the coffee shop and I’ll buy you a beverage.)
As for Substack, it’s always been free. I started with mirroring the weekly newsletter there. Now, we’re adding a $1/month paid tier.
With both platforms now having a paid tier, We’re going to have content exclusively for subscribers. We’ll be introducing our series on the Napoleonic-period of Lucien Rousselot this afternoon. The first post will drop on Tuesday. Additionally, we’ll have New Orleans history stuff, seriously geeky fun stuff, for subscribers.
The Podcast
Boyd Cruise painting of The Louisiana State Armory, on St. Peter Street, behind the Cabildo. It was the subject of Podcast 45.
We tried a more-exclusive podcast tier a while back, and it flopped. The re-boot will be a bit different. Instead of a higher-level tier subscription required for bonus pod episodes, we’re going to offer those eps via Patreon and Substack to subscribers at the $1 level. If you want to donate more, you can subscribe at the $5/month level. Once we get a dozen or so higher-tier subscribers, we’ll add content for those folks. The rationale here is simple. I’m pretty lazy as a rule, but if y’all are putting fifty bucks or more a month in my pocket, I’ll get off my butt.
We’ll start exclusive podcast content with deep-dives into topics from the free, long-form pods. For example, we did the August “Third Thursday” talk at the Jefferson Parish Library on the art of Boyd Cruise. There were a bunch of his paintings in the talk, which we’ll expand on in, say, 20-minute talks. We’ll also go back to the content in the books and go deeper on specific people, places, and topics that maybe only got a hundred or so words for the caption.
Let’s go!
St. Aloysius College, Barracks and Chartres, 1869
I’m confident that this model, based on $1/month, will work. As I’ve said in the past, I’ve seen what y’all pay five bucks or more a month for, and what we offer here clears that bar. If you have any questions about all this, give me a shout via email, edward@nolahistoryguy.com, or stop by when I’m staffing the Information Desk at the Cabildo.
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