Weekly Roundup

From Candypedia

Weekly Roundup is the free Bittersweet Candy Bowl email newsletter that originally carried the Ships Ahoy strips. It launched between mid-September and mid-November 2016,[1][2] and nearly a decade later it is still turning up in readers’ inboxes.[3]

History

BCB was emailing its readers long before the Roundup existed. A mailing list was already around by April 2011, with the signup tucked at the bottom of the store page, and it was mostly used for book and merchandise news.[4] The front page pitched it under a few different names over the years, including an “Occasional Newsletter” promising “new books, big changes, that sort of thing”,[5] and the authors deliberately kept it quiet. Oliver said in 2015 that the list was reserved “for serious stuff” only,[6] and as late as September 2016 the site was still promising major announcements just “a handful of times a year”.[1]

By mid-November 2016, the authors had replaced the old signup box with the BCB Weekly Roundup.[1][2] They pitched it as “our little experiment”, with a Monday-morning story summary, “BCB comings and goings”, and a Roundup-exclusive comic strip.[2] By March 2017, Veronica was happy to report that the experiment had “been doing pretty well”.[7] The authors continued using the Roundup for major announcements. A January 2021 newspost told readers to sign up “to be the first to know” when the Omnibus went on sale.[8]

After a long hiatus, the Roundup returned in full in March 2026, and it now runs on the authors’ own system rather than through MailerLite. When the authors closed the BCB Store that May, they directed customers to the Roundup for word of its reopening,[9] and as of August 2026, the signup box on the front page of the site promises “Full BCB pages from the past week, exclusive comics, and more!”[3]

Format and contents

From the launch through at least 2021, issues went out every Monday morning.[2][10] As of August 2026, the newsletter’s signup page makes the same Monday-morning promise.[11] Oliver has explained the choice a couple of times: Monday is easy to remember, it feels like the start of a fresh week,[12] and BCB’s traffic is highest on work and school days anyway. In his words, “big things happen on Mondays because I assume people are fresh and receptive to new ideas \ ready to spend money.”[13]

In 2021, the authors said an issue recapped the week’s updates and revisited classic chapters on Webtoon. It also covered “the happenings of our week — and, of course, it closes with an exclusive comic.” It’s free, too.[10] As of 2017, Oliver put together and sent the emails while Veronica drew the strips.[14] The Roundup ran on MailerLite at the time, and Oliver described working around a signup bug in the software.[15]

Ships Ahoy

The Roundup’s signature extra was Ships Ahoy, a shipping comic strip the site once summed up as a “let’s ship anyone with anyone” diversion.[16] Funnily enough, it wasn’t invented for the newsletter. The strips began as an idea for Bittersweet Club International, and when the Roundup started rolling out, “a three-panel comic shipping various romantic pairings seemed like an obvious fit”.[17] The first season ran nineteen strips, and by 2018 new subscribers were being greeted with a dozen of them on signup.[18] The series eventually reached 79 strips in total. Its final season of fourteen, with pairings chosen by “a huge ranked poll”, was unlocked as a stretch goal of the 2020 Omnibus Kickstarter and ran over fourteen weeks of the Roundup in 2021.[10][19]

The authors don’t post the strips publicly after their newsletter run. Oliver has said the goal is to “keep them kind of exclusive, but not for them to be lost forever”.[20] They archived the whole series, season by season, in the BCI Members’ Library. The 2021 finale completed the set.[21][16]

Trivia

  • Veronica and Oliver once considered styling the Roundup as a Roseville High school newspaper, and Oliver even sketched the idea out. It never went anywhere. Oliver explained why when he asked “do we have to write in a faux-newspaper style every damn update forever?”[14]
  • In 2018, the site’s own pitch invited readers to “join the thousands of BCB fans who look forward to an email of cat drama every Monday morning”.[18]
  • In July 2018, Oliver used the page 20 commentary of It’s All in the Mind to complain that Veronica hadn’t read the Roundup issue where he asked readers to send him birthday messages.[22]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 “Bittersweet Candy Bowl (archived front page)”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2016-09-14.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 “Bittersweet Candy Bowl (archived front page)”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2016-11-14.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 “Bittersweet Candy Bowl”. bittersweetcandybowl.com.
  4. ↑ “BCB newspost: “Posters, stickers, new charms and conventions!””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2011-04-28.
  5. ↑ “Bittersweet Candy Bowl (archived front page)”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2013-07-13.
  6. ↑ Oliver (2015-04-04). “Bittersweet Candy Bowl Tumblr post”. Tumblr.
  7. ↑ Veronica (2017-03-14). “Bittersweet Candy Bowl Tumblr post”. Tumblr.
  8. ↑ “BCB newspost: “Have you been reading our Webtoon?””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2021-01-11. Archived from the original on 2021-01-16.
  9. ↑ “BCB Store (archived page)”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2026-05-17.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 “BCB newspost: “Ships Ahoy sets sail for its final season: in your inbox, and on BCI!””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2021-02-22. Archived from the original on 2021-03-09.
  11. ↑ “Weekly Roundup”. bittersweetcandybowl.com.
  12. ↑ Oliver (2017-08-20). “Bittersweet Candy Bowl Tumblr post”. Tumblr.
  13. ↑ Oliver (2017-01-24). “Bittersweet Candy Bowl Tumblr post”. Tumblr.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Veronica and Oliver (2017-04-04). “Bittersweet Candy Bowl Tumblr post”. Tumblr.
  15. ↑ Oliver (2017-08-06). “Bittersweet Candy Bowl Tumblr post”. Tumblr.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 “BCB newspost: “A new member-only Augustus and Lucy chapter and ALL the Ships Ahoys!””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2021-08-09. Archived from the original on 2021-09-13.
  17. ↑ “BCB newspost: “Sakura-Con, Ships Ahoy, San Japan and… sssDiscord””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2018-03-19. Archived from the original on 2018-05-11.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 “Bittersweet Candy Bowl (archived front page)”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2018-07-21.
  19. ↑ “The Bittersweet Candy Bowl Omnibus”. Kickstarter. 2020-11-23.
  20. ↑ Oliver (2021-03-12). “Bittersweet Candy Bowl Tumblr post”. Tumblr.
  21. ↑ Oliver (2019-03-31). “Bittersweet Candy Bowl Tumblr post”. Tumblr.
  22. ↑ Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 20
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