What You're Actually Walking Into When You Visit This Site
From the archive. This issue went out June 10, 2026 and is kept as it was sent. Anything it says about prices or dates was true then — for what things cost today, see the pass or the store.
The Underground Publishing Survival Guide – $5 — The practical manual for publishing outside the gatekeepers and keeping the money. The argument and the method in one short field guide.
Medium Money – Christina Piccoli figured out Medium before everybody else and wrote the playbook — One of the sharper people working the platform distribution angle. If you’re using Medium as one of those entry doors, her guide is the one to start with. (Affiliate link, the building takes a cut.)
What You’re Actually Walking Into When You Visit This Site
Most websites are brochures. This one is a world you entered the moment you subscribed.
Most websites are brochures. They tell you what a person does, how to pay them, where to follow them on the platforms. There is an About page with a professional headshot and a tagline and a list of accomplishments recent enough to still feel relevant.
Mine is a set piece.
The universe that nicheof.one sits inside is bigger than the site. GZS Records carries a history back to 1946, a family lineage, an artist roster, a mythology about interdimensional signal bleed that explains why the music sounds the way it does. The fiction I write under J.D. Forrest and the pen names that work alongside it share a cosmology. Characters from one story surface in the margins of another. There is a radio station playing inside the site, and the radio station exists within the fiction, and the fiction exists within the world you walked into when you subscribed.
Transmedia, but not the corporate version. No movie tie-ins, no theme park deal. One person building a world and releasing parts of it through different doors. The newsletter is one door. The store is another. The radio is another. The community is another. They all open into the same room.
The strange thing about building this way is that readers start sensing the shape of something larger before they can name it. They don’t know the lore yet. They only know the site carries weight. Like it existed before they arrived and will keep existing after they leave.
It did. It will.
You weren’t browsing. You were entering.
Reply and tell me which door you came through. ~ J.D.
End of brief · the tower is warm