One book & one film. Four currencies. And no single platform could do it.
Big Sky Limited needed a signed hardcover shipping worldwide out of Australia, where every copy came with a feature film in English or Japanese.
So I built it on Ghost and then ran it for six years.
a wild ride
The brief that stumped every platform.
This began as a Squarespace landing page and then the brief expanded: a paywall, a members-only zone with a robust publishing schedule, multiple feature-length films to license and a book to ship worldwide.
When that outgrew a landing page, the hunt was on.
Sell a signed, numbered hardcover of Andrew Kidman's writing, art, and photography with a print run of 1,250, that ships out of Australia. Inside each book purchase, a unique code good for his 58 minute feature film, streaming in English or Japanese, priced in US + AUD dollars, and euros or yen, depending on who's buying.
Then put a members-only zone behind it so the people who care can pay monthly for full access to everything else.
I spent most of 2022 finding out that nothing does this out of the box. Squarespace Member Areas couldn't protect the video. MemberSpace could, but not the fulfillment. Gumroad handled the book and dropped the film. And Vimeo On Demand was straight up legal quicksand. Shopify wanted me to open an Australian store from Los Angeles and then charged $25 a month …for a button. WordPress and MemberPress would have worked but I wasn't about to put this client there.
The integrated build!
Ghost, and everything bolted to it
Ghost gave me memberships, a newsletter, and Stripe in one place, with a theme layer I could get underneath to heavily customize to exacting specs. And that last part is why it won so handily.
I wired the selling workflow to Sellfy to generate a unique license per book sold, and added a 3-streams in 30 days option.
Then. Shipping zones by region, four currencies at checkout, and separate English and Japanese products so nobody had to email asking which version to buy.
The storefront’s Three products in one catalogue. The book at $135, and the film, To purchase or stream, in three languages.
Then came The Black Hole: a members-only zone at $5 a month, fed by a steady bi-weekly newsletter.
When people wanted to gift it, which Ghost doesn’t do and neither did the theme, I coded that in too.
Six years. Two storefront moves, one of them after SendOwl raised its fees by 745%. (NOT A TYPO.)Two host migrations, Ghost Pro to self-hosted and then again when the host got acquired out from under us. And guess what? The front end never flinched once and not one single member ever noticed.
The brand changed direction in 2023 and the whole front end got rebuilt into the magazine theme it runs on now. Nobody lost access, nobody lost a login, and the archive stayed intact.
(There was also the week Zapier’s math stopped working and I ripped the entire automation layer out. Nobody misses it.)
The LIVE storefront. Price, shipping zones, print run and film credits in one frame.
The members-only zone
The Black Hole, and the gate that paid for it
Anyone could read the opening. Past that, the page asked for $5 a month, processed the payment, and dropped them straight back to where they left off. Six years of that on desktop, tablets and phones.
Same store on a phone. Add to cart on every product.
Article, byline, gate, and a read-more row → ALL locked behind payment
This part wasn't in the budget
I hired two Ghost developers. One vanished.
He took the brief and the money and ran, then stopped answering. The build was half done.
So! I learned the theme architecture myself. I ran Ghost locally, edited the Handlebars templates by hand, layered a custom stylesheet over the base theme, and version controlled the whole thing on GitHub so I could safely break it.
When a host migration orphaned a few hundred images, I wrote a Python script to match them back to their posts by publish date and move them where they belonged. When I needed content out of the system, I pulled it through the Ghost Admin API from the command line.
None of that was in the original scope. But all of it was the job.
Running it
And then I ran the thing for six years
Building it was year one, and the five that followed featured a bi-weekly publication.
Posts went up, the newsletter went out alternate Wednesdays, contributors sent work in from three continents and four languages, and somebody had to schedule it, proof it, size the images and ship it. That somebody was me, with the honorable and inimitable Dave Parmenter editing alongside me for two of those years.
I also managed all Support tickets for the org. Lost license keys, blocked emails, a buyer in Japan who got the English file, issuing refunds. Six years of that and the client never once had to think about any of it.
I managed most of the project on a monthly retainer, which I now call House Calls. Three of the client’s other projects are still on it.
Results
How it performed
One in five people who signed up paid. The range for paid publications is 3 to 10%, so the gate and checkout earned their keep every day they were up. 134 out of 614 members, on a site that never spent a single dime on ads.
The newsletter averaged a 66% open rate and a 20% click rate. One send hit 30% clicks.
Readers came from the US, Australia, Japan, the UK, New Zealand, France, Singapore, Canada and Brazil.
The conversion is the one I’m proudest of. Anyone can collect email addresses. Getting a fifth of them to hand over a card, and two in three to open every send, is a build doing a damn fine job.
Ghost dashboard, all time. The Black Hole newsletter.
Dave Parmenter edited the publication with me.
We had ourselves a time:
“Worked with Ema for nearly two years editing multi-media content for a surf culture-based website that published original articles weekly. This required considerable cat-herding in wrangling contributors who were disparate creative types around the world in varied languages. Ema is a top-drawer websmith—and is also a terrific copywriter and copy editor—and kept the wheels on and adroitly steered clear of many potholes. She is fun to work with. I learned more from her than she learned from me.”
Dave Parmenter · Writer and editor • Big Sky Limited
Got a build nobody else will take?
Six years, and the lights go dim in 2027
Big Sky stopped publishing in 2026. Subscriptions closed with it, and the site stays up until the formal shutdown in 2027.
I’m handling the wind-down the same way I handled the launch. Billing stopped on schedule and members were notified, so no one pays for something they aren’t getting.
Six years live, and the only rebuild was one the itself brand asked for.
not too shabby!a BIG FAQing deal
Do you stick around after launch?
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Indeed I DO.
This one clocked six years, and I still manage three of the client’s other projects.
Monthly care and maintenance is something I actually sell, (known around here as House Calls), so if that’s the type of help you also need, definitely bring it up on the call.
Your platform should never be the problem.
Eighteen+ years, any platform, any problem. Ghost, Squarespace, or whatever the heck your work actually needs.