Unfortunately, we come bearing bad news this late in the year. We’ve recently been informed of changes to printing and shipping costs for 2022 that make it pretty much impossible to keep publishing Offscreen – at least for now. With a heavy heart, we’ve therefore decided to put issue 25 on hold indefinitely.
When Patrick and I started working on this issue, we were hopeful that the worst effects of COVID on global logistics were behind us, but prices for printing, packaging and shipping have continued to surge, while delivery time frames have remained erratic. We could potentially recover some of these new costs by increasing our cover price, but that would make the magazine even less accessible and it also wouldn’t save us from further unexpected price hikes in the near future.
The transition to Patrick as the lead editor and publisher of Offscreen hinged on the idea of him running Offscreen together with Sentiers as his main jobs, providing a somewhat predictable income based on previous years. That’s currently just not feasible and so we put the transition on hold for now, too.
It’s a disappointing end to a challenging year, but we decided to make this difficult call now, before we invest a substantial amount of money in the production of issue 25, only to realise later that getting the magazine to readers and retailers would leave us with a financial hit.
As initially planned, Offscreen will go back into stand-by mode and I will reconsider our options when/if the impacts of COVID have subsided and prices have somewhat stabilised.
Subscribers, please note: If you’ve already prepaid for issue 25 as part of your subscription, we can either refund this issue now or leave it in our system as a pre-order. For a refund, simply contact us with a short ‘Refund for #25 please’ and we will initiate the refund to your credit card ASAP and cancel your subscription.
Despite the devastating news, we are both immensely grateful for the many kind, encouraging words from you all in the last few months. We wish all of you a restful break and a great start to the new year!
To stay in touch with Patrick and me, you can subscribe to our respective newsletters: Sentiers and Dense Discovery.
Best,
Kai (and Patrick)