HARLOT Magazine is transitioning to a periodical digital magazine format, effective immediately, with Issue #1 set to release sometime in June. Initially these will be monthly, but as we get into a groove of making them, we can move to a biweekly format.
To spell out what this means in explicit terms: we are not posting every day. The majority of our content will be posted in an e-book form. As the site is not updating every day, it is no longer my day job. As of now, there are no full-time HARLOT staff members. We are all working on this as we can.
Moving to a periodical has a lot of advantages for our team:
- The team involved in decision-making is spread over 8 time zones, in 5 countries, and as we’re not able to pay any of them the competitive full-time wage necessary to get any of us to live on another country’s schedule, this format helps us make decisions at a pace that suits our geography.
- It plays to our strengths: thoughtful essays paired with incredible art.
- It allows everyone to put the amount of work into each issue that is sustainable for them, which allows us to have consistency; more on this in a bit.
The periodical will be released for free on platforms that allow for people to pay what they want for them. That money will be then be distributed to everyone who worked as staff on that issue—we will still pay outright for content as long as our Patreon and remaining operational funds allow.
We will also sell ad space within the magazine, which, as a digital publication, will still let people click on a thing and take them to a website.
All this and more art, longer articles, and the sort of content that doesn’t always translate to a website very well. It’s a lot of plusses.
Moving to a periodical will also have advantages to our readers:
- It lets you read the content at your own pace; with multiple sites posting multiple articles every day, it can be hard to keep up with all the content you want to.
- It creates an immersive, more intimate reading experience.
- No matter what happens to the site, you’ll always have that content on hand. We will be publishing our back catalog of previous articles piecemeal in our magazines for posterity.
There’ve been a number of obstacles in us attaining consistency—pulled funding, understaffing, callouts and public power struggles. This has been unfair for everyone involved: there are quite a few articles still in the pipeline that we haven’t been able to publish or devote time to editing because we’ve been entangled in just trying to preserve the site.. We’re choosing a format that does best by the people we’re trying to serve, writers and readers alike.
Our affiliated blogs, like The Wanderer, Red No. 2, and Postmodern Parent will be folded into our periodical. The same goes for our column I’m Poly & So Can You.
We will continue to post new articles on the site to maintain interest and just to make sure those articles are being put to best use.
What HARLOT has really excelled at, in my opinion, is getting writers noticed—several writers who’ve worked with us have gone on to work with larger feminist sites. I don’t begrudge that place in the economy. In that vein of non-competition, the HARLOT social media feeds will be used to promote all the projects that have been started by those connected to the site that could use the visibility we have.
I don’t find any defeat in saying “here are the resources we have, here’s what we can do with it, let’s focus on doing something well and within our scope, even if it means we can’t ‘keep up’ with other sites in our purview.” We’ve all rolled with a lot of punches.
Thank you all, so much, for your support for us. Thank you for every social media share, every comment, every time you saw someone on twitter talking about a thing and linked them to one of our articles.
Thank you for all the advertisers who entrusted us with their funds.
Thank you to all the writers, devs, artists, and other staff members who’ve helped us continue for two months to the date since our funding was pulled.
HARLOT Magazine Issue #1 is going to be so rad.
We’ll announce the details as they manifest.