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Opium's Subscribe Or I'll Kill Someone Initiative (aka Opium's Subscribe So We Can Last Forever Strategy) |
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by Todd Zuniga
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A quick story: in 2000, I bought my favorite magazine at the time (and, in many ways, still is): Story Magazine. With that issue, I discovered that I was holding the magazine's last issue. I felt a sort of jarring disappointment, an educating depression that things don't last forever.
I want Opium to last forever. Recently--after finding that I had misplaced a zero in our bank account (actually, a few zeroes)--I found that Opium had much less money than I thought we did. It was a frightening moment for me and the life of the magazine, but an important one. I discovered how acutely important Opium was to me and the literary community--and finagled a way to financially prop up the magazine for the short term.
It's very difficult for me--not because of pride, but because of how much I care--to ask the same community that has made Opium such a vibrant and storied place for fiction, poetry, interviews, and downright daring, to help me in the cause to keep Opium going forever. But just think: $1.50 a month to assist in infinity. Not bad.
I'll admit that as a fiction writer myself, as many of you are, I've described Opium as a timesuck, a distraction, an eater of my potential novels. But I've also, far more often, described Opium as an innovative, exciting magazine both online and off that showcases that reading can be presented in an exciting manner, and can out-entertain the latest episode of Lost, an hour with Grand Theft Auto IV, a few minutes of YouTube.
I hope you see this isn't a request for charity, but a plea for support, an invitation to invest. Consider that a one-year Opium subscription is 1/1944th of your annual income if you make $35,000/yr. Is that a selling point? We're hoping that's a selling point. (Also, if you want to aid Opium's march to infinitude, but $18 seems steep, there are other, more fiscally responsible ways to help, for $10, $6, or even $2.75--and of course Paypal donations from 11 cents to $11,000 are always welcome: opiumprint@gmail.com.)
Really, seriously, Opium is a progressive effort, from our print magazine to our Literary Death Match reading series, to our evolving websites in both the United States and Europe (and the eventual launch of Opium Studio and Opium Live). Your subscription will not only support our efforts, but it'll land a copy of Opium in your mailbox every six months, a sparklingly (and taxingly) designed gift that will make you the talk of the room. Plus, you'll get an invitation to participate in our Opium Around the World Party (where you don't even have to leave your house) that we've been planing for our 10th year anniversary (only three years away!).
And because we believe in incentive, if you subscribe now, you'll get a back issue free of charge, shipped with the first issue you order. THAT'S THREE FOR THE PRICE OF TWO! Or, if you've smartly subscribed to the two-year subscription, that's FIVE FOR THE PRICE OF FOUR!
These are issues that include stories that have been selected for Best American Non-Required Reading, two stories that are now finalists for Pushcart Prizes, cartoons by people who can--and some who sort of can't--draw!
So, please: Subscribe! Or I'll kill someone! I mean, so we can last forever! If you have any questions at all about this (you must, right?), ask them, and I'll answer right on OpiumMagazine.com.
Thanks, as always, for your support and interest in Opium. It boggles my brain that Opium has come this far (after I had originally intended for it to last one calendar year when it launched in February 2001).
Todd Zuniga
Founding Editor
What we're doing...
...for the environment: no air-shipped issues, and printing on recycled paper!
...for literature: publishing the next great stars alongside already established ones!
...for design: creating an inventive, can't-look-away design every six months!
...for contests: presenting fun, goofball structures like our 7-line, bookmark and 500-word memoir contests!
...for old ladies who have fallen: picking them up!
...for waffles: way less than we hoped.
Click here and subscribe, subscribe, subscribe! What a great summer gift! What a great way to romance a lady! What a great way to have another book!
     
Todd Zuniga is Opium's founding editor, and the president of Opium for the Arts. His fiction has appeared in print and online. He lives between Paris and couches all over the United States.
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