Dear subscribers, blog readers, and friends:
After over a decade of running Stay Free!, I'm sad to say that I've decided to stop publishing the magazine. We're going to do one more issue and then publish more or less exclusively on the web. There are a number of reasons, but the over-arching theme is burnout -- burnout coupled with financial woes.
Selling ads has gotten all but impossible. Indie record labels and small book publishers -- our bread and butter -- are in the toilet. Ditto newsstand sales. No one goes to book stores looking for zines anymore; the nerds are all online. And while I once welcomed the challenge of making things work on a tight budget, I just can't bring myself to beg another distributor to pay us the money they owe -- or to beg more local stores to let us leave out free magazines.
Stay Free! has been the world to me; nearly every good friend of mine I have I met through the zine. But I'm no longer a twentysomething eager and willing to spend every waking moment working on projects. I don't know when exactly I got sick of not having a personal life but the weight of constantly working really took it's toll last year. While Stay Free! shall continue on the web (ie the blog), there's not going to be as much of it as there was a couple of years ago.
Obviously, there's the matter of owing subscribers for issues they'll never receive. I'm going to look into handing that money to a similar publication (Punk Planet? Mother Jones?), so you will get *something.*
The street date for the next and last issue -- architecture and obsolescence -- is still up the air. I was hoping to have it out in April or May, but that's looking unlikely at this point.
We are alternately considering publishing a "best of" in book form. If any of you know publishers who'd be interested in working with us, please let me know.
With much love and sincerest thanks for your support,
carrie
I'll be sure to follow the project on the Web, but the magazine will be surely missed.
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