Lifetime subscription? Only kidding
Dave Eggers, the author and publisher of McSweeney's, is trying to back out of a lifetime subscription deal he used to get the magazine off the ground. According to a typically bitchy item on the New York media blog Gawker, Eggers and Co. acknowledge they got people to pay $100 for a lifetime sub, but has written a note to those lifetimers saying:"We can't tell you how much we appreciated that. Now that we've somehow kept this thing going for twenty-two issues, we thought that we'd check in with you and see if we could maybe, you know, move on."Apparently what they propose is to extend the sub for another year and send a certificate of "lifelong gratitude" and a couple of premiums, including a copy of Eggers's most recent book.
An annual 4-issue sub to McSweeney's, an eccentric publication that is more a book than a magazine, costs US$55.
posted by D. B. Scott at
12:30 pm
3 Comments:
no way..no goddam way.
your credibility is ZERO as a publisher if you back out of this.
it's time to MOVE ON only when the subscribers say it's time to move on...
the publisher is being a cheap bastard...and everyone knows it.
McSweenys?
McStingy
My original comment got lost in the ether so here I am again, now with the pleasure of following anonymous, and disagreeing.
I think if any magazine can pull this kind of thing off, it's McSweeneys. It's like a very fair alimony settlement...
With issues of this magazine now at $24 a piece and subscriptions at $55 a year, you can hardly blame the publisher for asking. I do believe that the subscribers have the kind of relationship with this literary magazine that they will see the wisdom, and those who don't will cancel, and the publisher wins both ways.
This wouldn't work for 99.9% of us. But I bet it works for Eggers. And his circulators can look forward to hate letters set in verse -- rhyming couplets or haikus? Much better than profanity and junk mail.
eggers / mcsweeney's have a very intimate relationship with their readers. for example, dedicated readers were the first distribution model for the mag, taking it around local stores. I don't think the back-out will make them look good, or work for everyone, but the relationship is such that eggers could probably back out of the lifetime sub, AND ask people to give another $100 and they'd do okay.
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