Publisher's Note

One of the hard choices you make as a publisher is determining where the money goes.

It’s a fun choice as well; there’s nothing quite as awesome as paying authors and poets for really spectacular work. Sometimes we like to think that getting cash for our work is somehow… crass. And yet at the same time, it’ an amazing feeling to know that someone likes your work enough to give you money for it. Exposure, after all, is a term for nearly dying of cold.

That divide between cash and art is something that’s nearly always on my mind. As I write this, the Kickstarter for my next project is about to fund, and I’ll be able to give more creative people more money for their work. I’m also thinking about how to keep recompose going past the original Kickstarter-funded year, and how to limit the need to keep doing new rounds of crowdfunding every year.

I put issue #0 up on the webstore, and was surprised to find people buying it. But I earmarked those few sales as money to go toward next year.

I’m going to put half the content up for free on the web. Backers, of course, will get the whole issue delivered to their e-mail. And the individual issues will be put up for sale at the usual electronic outlets for $1.50 - a fair price, but more than the backers paid. I’ll probably (probably) put the rest of the content from the first issue up for free when the second issue goes live, and so on.

I don’t know how much we’ll make from that, but I hope it will at least make things easier for volume 2 next year.

On a related note, Anton and Leslie decided that they saw so many wonderful new works with our first call for submissions that they wanted to include more with the next issue. So we’re taking the funds for reprints and using it to add an additional spot for an extra new story and new poem next time.

I hope the works here affect and effect you, and help you to put things together differently.

—Steven Saus