What a mess of things to learn, and none of it easy. It seems like I can set up a subscribe tool pretty easily. There are lots of tools, all of which can grow with me (that is, grow with the size of my followers). Most tools have a free tier for this, up to about 1000 subscribers, but after that they get pricier--starting at $10/month and growing fast with people.
In really rough numbers, that's about 5¢ a subscriber each year. That would mean that if I released a book each year, and expected to make $1 off each sale, I'd need to have 1 in 20 people on my subscriber list buy the book to break even. Getting that many subscribers may be optimistic, but I surely should plan for success. More research here.
It seems I could create a good mailing list and connect it to this blog, and otherwise not have a web site. I think that might be the most cost effective approach, or perhaps just the most prudent to get a move on rather than get bogged down by the perfect answer.
Some of the email list tool companies include some simple web page tools, but most of those don't look like they will grown as my platform does. All of them have either a free tier for that or a trial period. I suspect I'll pick the best two or three to play around with before making a choice.
One surprisingly nice thing about the mailing list tool providers, is that most include some form of electronic purchase interface. That could change the whole cost justification if I could sell and deliver even a few books directly through that platform.
Finally, there's the question of website domain name. This is an extra $4-$20 per year. Not too bad, really. But these sites, and other web hosting sites bundle the domain and web services, and the pricing for those bundles can be confusing, particularly trying to figure out the features that come with each level. Again, there are free tiers, but with limited features. If you need anything but the most basic features, it starts in the $10-$20 per month--not a typo, per month.
Ideally, I'd have a top level domain for a number of my hobbies. It would be nice to get a site that can grow not just with my writing, but support all the hobbies I would like a website for, including my iPhone app for the license plate game: PlateHunt. A nice feature for that game would be to log game data to a central server so that people can share finds with friends and submit new license plate types. That requires some programming on my website, which the hosting service would need to support. Some do; some don't.
If you're eyes are glazing over at this point, well, you get the point.
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