Writing from my kitchen table while my cats try to knock my coffee on the floor to tell me they want to go outside, so I will be brief.
Okay, made you look (hopefully) but we would LOVE to send you that email at the end of next month when we mail out our first ever print edition!
So what’s going to be in the print edition, anyway? (And how you can contribute?)
First and foremost, our print issue, just like our site, will be primarily curated from the submissions we receive. The deadline for submissions for the print issue will be Friday, March 17, 2023. (Just to note: everything in the print issue will end up on the site, however not everything on the site will necessarily be in the print edition.)
Outside of prose, we are also accepting submissions for art, comics, cartoons, etc.
And we will also be featuring some of our favorite Save to Drafts submissions, so feel free to add yours, even if you submitted once upon a moon and now have something new. (All Save to Drafts are published anonymously.)
Why are we doing this?
There’s a lot that can be said about the importance and the fun of physical media. When Monica and I talked at the start of this year about what we wanted to bring to Talk Vomit, we knew we wanted something more connected and slower-paced than trying to have a new Hashtag Link In Bio twice a week. Monica had recently read How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, which I am now reading at her strong recommendation. What really struck us both was the quote “I will participate, but not as asked.” In the attention economy, one should always strive to get more clicks, views, ad revenue, and paid subscribers. It wasn’t sustainable, we want to enjoy our little corner of the internet, but we didn’t want to keep up with the expectation to be bigger and better every day.
We made a decision to end our paid subscription model, opened book club to everyone (guys, really it is free and this Thursday, please join), and opted for a physical print edition that we made with our own hands — both because it is the ideal way to consume media and because it is going to be fun for us to put together. Sales from the print edition will pay for the overhead costs of the site and eventually work to pay writers again. (We have paused this temporarily in order to create a sustainable model of revenue).
So, if you’re into it, preorders are open on the site now.
xoxo mary