How I Publish — Version 5.0

How I Publish Version 5.0

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After a short hiatus to recalibrate both body and brain, I’m officially back on air. Think of it as an intellectual pit-stop: the creative engine was still humming, but the driver had forgotten to check the oil. After months of steady publishing I realised I’d become a little too good at producing and not quite good enough at pausing.

The irony, of course, is that writing about reflection had begun to crowd out the act itself. So, I stepped back—physically, to move and breathe again; intellectually, to remember what unhurried thought feels like. No grand revelations, no spiritual detox—just the discipline of silence long enough to hear my own ideas forming again.

Cobwebs cleared and the soul appropriately caffeinated, I’m returning with something new—the latest chapter in the ongoing experiment of building a space for serious thinking online.

When I first began this series—charting the evolution of my publishing tools and thinking—it was less a technical diary than a meditation on how form shapes substance. Every shift in platform, from WordPress to Write.as to Ghost and back again, was really an inquiry into the relationship between clarity and control, between the craft of writing and the architecture that sustains it.

Now, with How I Publish — Version 5.0, I return to Ghost, which has itself matured to version 6. My first encounter with Ghost was in its youth—version 3—when it promised a clean, writer-centred experience but lacked the structure required for serious research and sustained dialogue. I left, eventually, for WordPress. But Ghost has grown. And, I suspect, so have I.

A Brief Archaeology of Platforms

• Version 1.0—WordPress: a workhorse; rich, powerful, and noisy.
• Version 2.0—Write.as: monastic simplicity; a silent cell that eventually proved too austere.
• Version 3.0—Ghost: promising minimalism, but not yet muscular enough for what I wanted to build.
• Version 4.0—WordPress (again): a return to craftsmanship and control; good for building an archive, clunky plugins and platform bloat make it exhausting to maintaining one.
• Version 5.0—Ghost (again), which feels less like a switch of tools and more like a change in my publishing philosophy.

Why Return, and Why Now

Ghost's latest incarnation reconciles the tensions that shaped my earlier restlessness. It is simultaneously elegant and capable, writerly and infrastructural. It offers focus without fragility.

Its privacy-first analytics, ActivityPub integration, and mature membership tools enable what I have always sought: a space where thinking, publishing, and community coexist without the interference of algorithmic noise.

Three commitments underpin this move:

1. To write with less friction. Fewer plugins, fewer updates, fewer distractions.
2. To cultivate conversation, not consumption. A community of readers who reflect and respond.
3. To sustain the work materially. Research and writing require time; time requires structure and support.

This new structure takes shape through two concentric circles of readership: The Commons and The Inner Circle.

The Commons

The Commons exists for readers who value open exchange—for those who come not to perform agreement but to think aloud together about leadership, ethics, and institutional life. It is the public square of this publication: a place for dialogue that is accessible, civil, and ongoing.

Members of The Commons receive:

• Access to an archive of over 200 articles on leadership & management, strategy, and organisational behaviour.
• A new article each month delivered to your inbox (including audio version).
• The ability to join discussion threads on posts.
• Occasional Inner Circle articles.

The Commons will always be free: an act of reciprocity between writer and reader, supported indirectly by those who choose to go further. The philosophical underpinning of this approach comes from John Locke (1632–1704):

Whenever legislators endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.
— John Locke

In short, The Commons keeps the gates open.

The Inner Circle

If The Commons is the town square or forum, The Inner Circle is the private study. It exists for readers who want not merely to read but to wrestle—those who see thinking as an ethical act and conversation as a form of inquiry.

Membership of The Inner Circle involves a small consideration, and those funds sustain ongoing research and the resourcing necessary to support such research in a digital age. In a sense, it revives an older tradition of patronage—without servility, without spectacle.

Members of The Inner Circle receive:

• Gratitude from me for support of my work.
• Access to my entire back catalogue of articles.
• All new articles as they are published delivered to your inbox (including audio versions).
• The Scribbler Newsletter (monthly): reflections on leadership & management, strategy, and organisational behaviour.
• Access to "marginalia"—behind-the-scenes reflections, reading notes, or philosophical sources (e.g., how Hannah Arendt informed a piece).
• Monthly Q&A or "Office Hours".
• Early invitations to events, talks, or online seminars.

The philosophical underpinning of this approach comes from Clarence Darrow (1857–1938):

Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away.

— Clarence Darrow

More than a list of perks, The Inner Circle is a community of practice—a small republic of readers who make sustained, independent scholarship possible.

The Ethics of the Journey

Each platform shift has been an exercise in moral as well as technical reasoning animated by Edmund Burke's warning—which still applies more than two centuries later:

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.

— Edmund Burke

I have learned that changing platforms too often can become a kind of avoidance—a way of hiding from the hard work of articulation, of growing the circle of this community, of avoiding the hard work of new programs—like the much needed podcast. Version 5.0 is part of my answer to that: an end to avoiding the membership challenge and a return to the rhythm of thinking and creation.

Ghost lets the writing breathe. It gives readers a way to gather not as consumers of insight but as participants in an ongoing inquiry into the moral and institutional dimensions of leadership.

Good night, and good luck.

William Caxton showing specimens of his printing to King Edward IV and his Queen is is licensed under Public Domain.