sub-Q is going on hiatus after August 2020

Tory Hoke (sub-Q‘s publisher) and I (its editor-in-chief) have been talking about the future of the magazine for several months now.

In the end, we decided to put the magazine on “indefinite hiatus,” which is the term genre magazines typically use for “closing down for the near future but we don’t like to say we’re closing down forever.”

There are a number of reasons for the hiatus, but mostly it comes down to the sheer amount of time it takes to manage a project like sub-Q, along with some changing life situations and new priorities (not in a bad way, fortunately!) that are going to make that time even harder to carve out than it already is.

As some of you may know, we had been in the process of transitioning the magazine from a for-profit entity to a non-profit this year, and were planning to run a subscription drive over the summer to put the magazine in the black. (Currently it runs a couple hundred dollars in the red with each issue, all of which comes directly out of the publisher’s pocket).

While I think we could have done well enough with the drive to keep the magazine going for a while longer, running a subscription drive and managing all the additional things we’d need to do after that operate smoothly as a non-profit organization would have taken a lot more time, so wouldn’t have really helped in terms of time management.

Will sub-Q come back in the future?

Maybe. (I certainly hope so!)

But only time will tell whether it does and, if so, what form it will take.

As for now, after our August 2020 issue sub-Q will be on indefinite hiatus.

That means we won’t be accepting submissions or publishing new content. However, all our existing content will remain up.

(If you’re an author and would like your work taken down from our site, please email me at stewart@sub-q.com and I can do that!)

Indefinite hiatus is sad, but!

August of 2020 also marks the 5th anniversary of sub-Q’s first content going online.

So, dang. Five years!

I’ve been here since close to the beginning, and it’s been a great ride that has absolutely changed the way I look at interactive fiction, writing, and life in general.

It’s thanks to our great community of authors, developers and artists, our fantastic staff, and our lovely readers that any of it could have happened at all.

So thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

I would especially like to thank all the generous souls who have supported us on Patreon or through a subscription on our website at any point. Your help really made a difference. Thank you a fourth time!

Stewart
editor-in-chief, sub-Q Magazine