Support Fireside — Subscribe to Fireside Quarterly

Printed matter is experiencing a resurgence of the best kind: it’s a new golden age for indie magazines with a focus on quality content and immersive reading. I’ve made a career out of working on online publishing in one form or another for the past ten or so years, but I’ve always loved print. So around this time last year, we started thinking about what it would look like if Fireside had a printed edition.

We wanted it to be beautiful — an eye-catching object worthy of the innovative stories and striking artwork we publish. It needed to be created fairly, and of the highest quality, in keeping with Fireside’s core values. And it needed to be sustainable within a year. After spending much of the winter and part of the spring designing, crunching numbers, and sourcing suppliers, Fireside Quarterly was born. So far, the magazine has been a success.

Fireside Quarterly redefines what a printed genre short fiction magazine can be, and has allowed us to explore better and more beautiful ways to tell stories. As we close out the year, we’re expanding our content mix to include poetry, and this week we start producing audio versions of each and every story, beginning with the January 2019 issue of Fireside Quarterly. Each issue of Fireside Quarterly costs around $15,000 to produce. This covers paying top word rates for three months of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, as well as paying for artwork, paying our staff, paying for printing, shipping, and occasionally some chocolate.

We’re so close to reaching our goal of returning to sustainability by the end of 2018, but we’re not quite there yet and we need your help. We need around 130 more subscribers in order to reach our goal of fully funding the ongoing production of Fireside Quarterly, so from now until the end of the year, we’re holding a subscription drive. We’ll be doing various promotions over the next weeks, in order to spread the word and get people to subscribe to Fireside Quarterly.

So if you value great stories, fantastic artwork, and beautiful printed objects, subscribe to ireside Quarterly. If you’ve already subscribed, send someone a gift subscription. Tell all your friends. Take a copy to your book club. Make your friends jealous, then tell them to subscribe. Help us build a better future for short fiction.

© 2018 Pablo Defendini

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