Some big changes are coming to Grimdark Magazine!
Having been on the market for two and a half years now, we’ve learnt a thing or two, and as we’ve grown, so has grimdark and our community! As a result, Grimdark Magazine is making some changes and growing to keep serving you the very best in grimdark fiction, reviews, interviews and genre coverage.
Subscriptions
Finally. It is surprisingly difficult to set up a digital subscription service in 2016. We were waiting on Amazon to step up, but it’s become clear they aren’t going to. Patreon, however, has become increasingly popular as a subscription service to magazines, and we think it will be a great way to let you manage your subscriptions and allow us to easily deliver to and communicate with subscribers.
Patreon is growing in popularity, but a lot of people haven’t used it before. Here’s what you need to know about Patreon:
- It’s easy to sign up and easy to cancel at any time.
- You only get charged when we publish an issue (quarterly) – just like a subscription. You’re looking at $20 per year.
- More support means more rewards for everyone!
Head on over and check out our new Patreon page to see what we mean!
Price Increase
Frankly, we’ve held ourselves back by trying to compete on price with magazines like Clarkesworld and Nightmare, who have thousands of general-interest readers. The economy of scale just doesn’t work for us (yet) to keep paying the pro-rates that we do and constantly striving for excellence. Lowering our quality is not an option so we have to raise our price.
We love grimdark for the same reasons you do and we’re part of the community. Grimdark is still a relatively small, but supportive community, and one that we invest in and care about. This price increase simply reflects what we need to provide at the quality we do, grow our magazine, grow our community, and stay on top of grimdark as it grows and changes.
The fact is, GdM is your magazine. It is here to serve you, cover what you want, and build the community that helps our favorite fiction thrive. That’s worth $5 once a quarter.
In our time we’ve provided short stories from some of grimdark’s premier authors including Mark Lawrence, R. Scott Bakker and Michael R. Fletcher, while also getting non-grimdark authors to give our way of things a crack – authors like Adrian Tchaikovsky and Aliette de Bodard, to name just a few! Let me tell you, we have no intention of slowing down. We are always setting our sights higher; we are looking to dramatically expand our website and non-fiction offerings, and to address grimdark as much as a way of life as a literary phenomenon.
New Website
We’ve been running our e-commerce store for a while now but with the introduction of Patreon have made the decision to move from the e-commerce platform to a simpler platform that works better for online content and links directly to either Patreon, Amazon, Apple, Kobo etc. for your purchases.
Keep an eye out for this in the future.
Conclusion
There’s plenty happening at GdM, but you can sip your beer safe in the knowledge that the customer experience remains forefront in the goals of our business model. GdM will provide more articles, more voices, and keep putting out our brand of dark and cheeky awesomesauce.
