A big announcement from your favorite boozeletter
A big announcement from your favorite boozeletter
Fingers is launching paid subscriptions! Here's what that means for you.
Hello Friends of Fingers! It’s your ol’ pal Dave Infante, editor/publisher of your favorite boozeletter, with a big announcement. Today, after a year and a half of publishing for free, Fingers is launching paid subscriptions! To celebrate, for the next 30 days I’m offering 25% off annual plans. If you’ve enjoyed my work here at Fingers over the past 18 months, please consider buying a subscription to support the future growth of this project!
Hopefully you’ve already smashed that button above and are no longer reading this. But in case you’re still here, let me tell you more about your project and what it can be with your generous support.
📈 How it started vs. how it’s going
I published the first edition of Fingers on Memorial Day Weekend of 2020. I was frustrated by the grind of freelance journalism and creatively stymied at my part-time gig at the local newspaper. I wanted a place to experiment and publish stuff I wouldn’t be able to place anywhere else. So I cobbled together a few old email lists, chose a name1, and created a Substack account. Just like that, Fingers was born.
At the time, my goals for the project were pretty ill-defined besides “publish good shit.” I committed to putting something every week or so, and hoped that if I did, I’d be able to grow the email list to 1,000 people by the end of 2020. I’m proud to say we passed that threshold in early December. Today, Fingers has over 1,400 good-looking and intellectually dazzling readers. More are joining every week! It’s been genuinely incredible to see this thing grow, and we’re just getting started, so secure your spot amongst the Fingers faithful and buy a subscription now.
Still not convinced? Fair enough! Keep reading for: why I think you should buy a subscription, what you get if you do, how your money will help this project, and more.
👊 Supporting independent drinks journalism (and me!)
For the past year and a half, I’ve been publishing Fingers for free, but to keep it going, I need your support. I’m a real boy, after all, and I have real expenses, like rent, healthcare, and food—not to mention the occasional eBay bid on rare original-formula Four Loko from a decade ago.2 I’m hoping that you’ll value the expertise, reporting, and writing that go into every edition of the boozeletter by upgrading to a paid subscription today.
Why buy a subscription to Fingers? So glad you asked, mon ami. Simply put: If you don’t, I can’t continue publishing it. I’m an independent journalist, and everything I’ve written to this point has been entirely for love of the game. I have no advertisers, no wealthy venture-capitalist backers, and no staff. It’s just me using my nights and weekends to break news and/or entertain myself (and hopefully you) with original coverage of drinking, labor, politics, and beyond.
The Fingers stories you love take hours and hours of work to produce, but it’s been terrific fun, too. I don’t regret it in the slightest. I want to do more of it, in fact! More deep reporting, more in-depth interviews, more experimentation with new formats (like podcasts and original Instagram content, which I’m already working on!) In the future, I’d love to pay occasional guest writers, start a Fingers book club, and maybe even develop merch.3 Upgrading to a paid Fingers subscription will help give me the time and financial ability to make these things a reality.
🧐 What do you get?
In addition to the fuzzy warm feeling you’ll get from supporting independent journalism, there are material benefits to upgrading your Fingers subscription. Paying subscribers will get the full experience:
Regular coverage, commentary, and reporting on drinking culture, being online, and beyond
Access to full archive of features, audio reads, interviews, and podcasts
Commenting privileges in subscriber-only discussion threads
Remember, for the next 30 days, annual subscriptions are just $60 for the whole year, compared to $96 if you pay monthly.4
As a special thank-you, the first 50 people to buy an annual subscription will get a handwritten note from me, mailed to them with a custom 3x3” Fingers sticker. And for diehard/financially stable subscribers who want to contribute a little extra to the war effort, there’s the Fingers Founding Member tier, which also includes a 2x2” limited-edition holographic sticker, and a 1-on-1 virtual drink with me so I can convey my undying gratitude for your support.5
🕒 Do you have to buy a subscription right now?
Preferably, yes! For those of you who have been reading Fingers for a while and are familiar with my work, I hope buying a subscription is an easy call. Plus, the 25%-off sale ends 30 days from now. But if you’re new to the boozeletter and aren’t sure yet whether it’s worth your hard-earned beer money, I totally respect your hesitation. Which is why for the next month, I’m going to keep everything Fingers has published completely accessible to everyone, regardless of subscription status. That way, you can read more of my work and see if it’s something you want to support financially. I recommend starting with some of Fingers’ most popular stories, such as:
Striking against "corporate greed" at Kentucky's biggest bourbon distillery
How the Twin Cities became a hotbed for craft beverage unionizing
You should also browse the interview archive for long-form Q&As with fascinating, smart, and unusual people from the American drinking landscape and beyond. Paying subscribers will always have access to this archive and all new Fingers interviews, but a month from now, it all goes behind a paywall. So if you want this sort of coverage delivered straight to your inbox, please—say it with me now!—buy a subscription.
🤔 What if you don’t upgrade to a paid subscription?
I understand that everyone has a limited media budget. If Fingers doesn’t fit into yours, that’s OK! Starting a month from now, free subscribers will continue to get occasional access to original features, interviews, threads, and podcasts. Even if you don’t buy a subscription right now, I’m still so grateful for the trust you’ve shown me by welcoming Fingers into your inbox, and I hope you’ll keep reading. (Selfishly, I also want you to stick around so I can eventually convince you that my work is worth paying for. But I promise not to be too pushy.)
If you aren’t able to buy a subscription today, you can still support the boozeletter by sharing this post on your social media channels.
Word-of-mouth is vital to the growth of this project, and I’d really appreciate your help getting the word out. (This goes for everyone who buys subscriptions, too. The more shares, the better. It all helps!)
🍻 And away we go!
I started Fingers with ill-defined goals. Now, I have one: consistently deliver to your inbox a smart, funny, and utterly unorthodox mix of award-winning journalism, interviews, and cultural criticism about how, what, and why we drink—and the money, power, and politics that both dictate and derive from the answers to those questions. That’s the mission. Well, that, and getting enough Friends of Fingers to buy into said mission for money so that I don’t go broke in the process.
Whether this is the first or 50th edition of Fingers you’ve read, thanks for supporting the boozeletter. The past year and a half has been a blast, and I’m so excited for the future. Signing off from Fingers HQ, it’s your fearless Fingers editor, reminding you that everything is hard seltzer now, except for this newsletter, which remains a newsletter.—Dave.
P.S.: As always, if you ever want to give me feedback on ways to make Fingers bigger, better, or boozier, email me at dave@dinfontay.com. I try to respond to Friends of Fingers as quickly as possible!
The name “Fingers” is a reference to my favorite drinking game, and also the quantity measurement for brown liquor, and also the appendages you use to type on a keyboard. It also seemed weird and offbeat and even a little dirty, which I liked. Other options, which I’m very glad I ultimately did not go with: Blog Half Empty, Heavy Drinking, and Thinking Heavily. Yeesh.
Just kidding, I’m not going to spend your money on dead-stock Four Loko. Unless you want me to write about it, in which case, I’ll happily do it for your reading pleasure/horror. I answer to you, the reader!
Fingers funnels? Fingers koozies? Fingers acid-reflux medication? The possibilities are endless!
I’ve set the “regular” annual price at $80, which already gets you two months free compared to the monthly rate. So if you take advantage of this launch sale, you’ll basically be getting Fingers for free for four and a half months—or roughly the length of time I refuse to deal with unwanted stray beers in my fridge before finally working up the motivation to drain-pour them.
Will this be awkward? Probably! But as you should know by now, I have absolutely no qualms about embarrassing myself for your approval.