Welcome to the new OFIC Magazine
At long last, we've returned from our hiatus.
Dear reader,
OFIC Mag is back! Here’s what we’ve been up to:
We ended our print run with issue #13 last October. It was not an easy or willing choice for us. Being a print publication was part of our initial vision for OFIC. Unfortunately our subscription platform of choice was Patreon, which eliminated its “per creation” billing option last fall. We publish three issues per year, so we charged three times a year. With that change forcing us to reconsider our workflow, we decided that the complications of printing and distribution were no longer conducive to our long-term goals—our long-term goals being: keep going for as long as possible.
Initially I intended to pivot to a fully online publication with stories posted on our website, because that’s how most digital lit mags work. But I started doing research into how other mags operate, and I discovered that while I love the aesthetic of many of them and the work they produce, I really hate how they’re organized. Namely, you click a random title of a random piece and start reading. With print, you can just turn pages; there’s an inherent order to it. But with online magazines presented as tables of contents with no information but a work’s title and its author, there’s nothing that really encourages you to read.
What I found myself thinking repeatedly was, “Just send me a story. I just want to read a story.” I don’t want to click on a link to a page with the story on it. I don’t want to click on a link that takes me to a page of other links, especially if those links are just author names I don’t recognize. I don’t want to be met with a paywall after three paragraphs. I just want a story, in full, in my inbox at regular intervals.
Then I thought, “Hey, why don’t I just...do that?”
And here we are.
How it works
We’re keeping it simple. Free subscribers receive one story every other week. No paywalls.
In addition to the above, paid subscribers ($5 per month or $30 per year) receive the PDF and EPUB files of each issue as it releases. New issues come out on April 1, July 1, and October 1 each year. You can also purchase them on our website for $8. We understand that’s a weird price discrepancy, but $5/month and $30/year is the lowest Substack will let us go.
Funds from paid subscriptions go toward our operational expenses and contributor honorariums.
In addition to our relaunch, here are some other changes we’re working on:
Building a digital archive
Since our initial launch in 2022, we’ve published 13 print issues containing a total of 112 stories. Recently we reached out to all our previous contributors and asked if they’d want their stories to be re-released online, and thankfully many of them said yes. So starting this month, every other Monday you’ll receive a story from a previous issue until our next issue in October.
We’ll also share stories from our archive sporadically throughout the year, particularly in January through March when we don’t have a new issue to post from.
New social media
Social media in general has kind of tanked in recent years, what with Twitter being taken over by a supervillain and AI slop infecting every corner of the internet. And yet we must persist. Going forward we aim to have a stronger and more consistent social media presence.
You can find us on:
Tumblr, which remains our platform of choice, being as we are a team of old school tumblrinas
X, simply because we already had that account set up
Bsky, which is a brand new platform for us but we have high hopes for it
Duosuma
We’ve finally moved away from Submittable, which has long been the bane of our existence. We’re instead using Duosuma to manage our submissions. We’ll open for submissions for our April 2027 issue in fall.
Lastly, here are a few miscellaneous notes/reminders:
To former patrons
We were unable to import our full mailing list from Patreon, so if you’re a former patron coming upon this post from a social media share and find yourself having to subscribe, please know that Patreon just straight-up erased most of our patrons’ email addresses. I did my best to go through and manually add people whose email addresses I knew, but I’m very sorry if I missed yours.
Back issues
If you’d like a physical copy of one of our previous issues, we have some remaining back stock you can purchase at our store. We’ve discounted all physical back issues to $12 each.
Up next…
Our next post will be on July 13—an essay I’ve written on the history and importance of the short story. After that, we’ll continue sharing archived pieces every other Monday until we publish issue #14 on October 1st.
Sincerely,
Beth Weeks, Editor-in-Chief
Looking forward to it!!!