Consolidating My Platform

I started Horror × Hope at the beginning of October to be an email newsletter and social media brand for sharing my horror and hopepunk fiction. I put it on Ghost, syndicated it to Substack and Medium, and promoted it via dedicated brand social media accounts on Bluesky, Instagram, and Threads.

After running it for the last quarter of the year, I now think that was pretty much all wrong.

I was following the advice I kept seeing online about how to build a brand and grow an audience, but it just wasn’t feeling right. I felt like I was performing for algorithms instead of people, and like I was creating “content” instead of art.

I’m extremely proud of what I did with Tribute, Witness, When the Black Wind Blows, We Are All Terrorists Now, and The Gilded King in 2025. I want to write more things like that, not spend all my time repackaging and tailoring the same underlying content to a bunch of different networks with their own special-snowflake rules and their empty promises of algorithmic access to attention.

So here’s what’s changing:

• I’m consolidating my online presence down to joshsutphin.com and my personal Bluesky and Mastodon accounts
• horrorxhope.com and all its existing posts will soon redirect to their counterparts on joshsutphin.com
• The Horror × Hope email newsletter and social media accounts will shut down

I have a separate email list on joshsutphin.com that I’ve been updating with a monthly digest for a while now. If you’re a current Horror × Hope subscriber and you want to continue receiving email updates from me—like, me as a person—please hop over here and sign up for that!

So that’s what’s changing. If you’d like to read more about my reasoning and how experienced the last few months of the Horror × Hope approach, check out this post.