On Thursday morning in Hội An, I registered writerstead.com.

The decision felt sudden, even though the idea wasn’t.

Daniel and I had been talking for months about an author-site publishing tool. We kept circling the same problem from different directions: writers have websites, newsletters, books, and years of work scattered around the internet, but it can be surprisingly hard to give all of that a real home.

I arrived in Hội An with several possible projects and didn’t know this was the one I would choose. After a week of open source work, walks around town with my family, and conversations with people here, WriterStead became the thing I wanted to build. Registering the domain made it real.

Now I have to explain it before it is finished.

WriterStead is for independent writers who want their writing, books, and information about themselves at an address they control. Readers should still be able to find the work after the writer has gone quiet for a while, and the writer should be able to keep changing the site as their work changes.

Why WriterStead

The internet is full of useful places to publish, and writers have built remarkable readerships on them. WriterStead can sit alongside those tools. Its job is to give a writer one address organized around their work instead of somebody else’s feed, rules, or business model.

That is why I keep calling it a home. The books and essays belong together, the writer gets to leave their fingerprints on the place, and it doesn’t look abandoned just because they haven’t published lately.

A writer’s website should feel less like a rented stall and more like a well-kept study.

With WriterStead, a writer chooses an address like yourname.writerstead.com, publishes their work, adds their books, and begins making the site their own. They can connect a custom domain when they are ready. The site becomes the place they point readers to, even if they still use other services for newsletters, sales, or social media.

Most of the work is in questions like these: What belongs on the homepage? How does an old essay stay findable? Can adding a book feel easy without making every book page look the same? How much should a theme decide, and where should the writer take over?

Those are the questions I want WriterStead to spend its time on. The other tools can keep doing what they do; WriterStead can be the place they point back to.

Why build it in public

This blog is where I’ll write about the decisions that change the product: why a feature exists, what a prototype taught me, what I got wrong, and what writers say they actually need. I expect the notes to wander through design, publishing, ownership, and the strange work of making a small software business from scratch.

Small product decisions blur together quickly. Writing about them will help me remember why I made them. It also gives other writers a chance to tell me I’m wrong before I’ve built too much around an assumption.

I have already changed my mind several times. I expect to do it again. When that happens, I want to be able to find the earlier reasoning instead of pretending the new answer was obvious all along.

Where things stand

Right now a writer can claim an address, publish a post, add books, and begin turning an empty site into a home. I’m filling in what happens around those steps.

What should the empty screen say? Which choices should appear right away? How much help does a person need before the help becomes clutter? I have already spent more time on a few button labels than I care to admit.

The next job is to put more real writing through it. Placeholder copy is cooperative. A long essay, an awkward book cover, a three-year gap in an archive, or a writer who works in two different genres will break things. I want to see which things.

WriterStead is two days old. There is already a working publishing path and a list of things I want to redo.

If you’re an independent writer, I’d genuinely like to know what your website makes harder than it should—and what you never want a publishing tool to ask of you again. A small annoyance is useful too.

Field note 001 · August 8, 2026