2012 has been a strong year for Cemetery Dance magazine, with new issues featuring great fiction from authors such as Douglas Clegg, Blake Crouch, Bill Pronzini, Steve Rasnic Tem, Terry Dowling, and many others; terrific non-fiction from Neil Gaiman, Lisa Morton, Hank Wagner, Bev Vincent, and many others; plus, of course, our usual suspects who make each issue special: Ed Gorman, Ellen Datlow, Don D’Auria, Thomas F. Monteleone, Mark Sieber, Michael Marano, Bev Vincent, Robert Morrish, and Nanci Kalanta. Brian James Freeman has gone above and beyond as Managing Editor to keep things on schedule, Kate Freeman has continued her excellent design work that started with CD #61, and Mindy Jarusek is still finding us new and talented artists to grace the pages of each issue, along with plenty of our long-time favorites.
Even with all this amazing content, publisher Richard Chizmar has always said we should never rest on our laurels. We have big plans for the future of the magazine, including two incredible “Special Issues” unlike any we’ve ever done in the 20+ years we’ve been publishing the magazine. (We also have a very special treat for Stephen King fans in the works — we can’t wait to tell you more about it later this month!)
As part of our goal to get the magazine on a firm quarterly schedule, we’ve sat down and evaluated every aspect of the publication for the first time in many years. The first thing we did was hire some very talented Associate Editors to help Managing Editor Brian James Freeman keep production moving even when the book line is consuming every waking hour for our office staff. As regular readers of the magazine already know, those Associate Editors are Norman Prentiss (Fiction), Lisa Morton (Features), and Joe Howe (Non-Fiction). In addition, we hired Nanci Kalanta to edit the Reviews section. They’ve been doing a terrific job of getting all of the material ready in a timely manner.
That was just the first step of the process, though. Something that became obvious during this evaluation of the magazine was how little profit we’ve been making from the thousands of newsstand sales for each issue. By “how little,” we mean we were making no profit. Why? That’s easy. We’ve only raised the cover price of the magazine once since 1988 while increasing the page count to as many as 144 pages and increasing our contributor pay rates. At the same time, our distributors are taking a healthy chunk of every sale. Plus the cost of printing has tripled in the last decade.
We should have been steadily raising the price over the last ten years, but we keep resisting and letting the book line carry the weight for the company, but looking at the numbers, we knew something was going to have to change if we wanted the magazine to be a priority and remain strong and healthy for years to come.
Our options were simple: cut content drastically, pay our contributors less, or raise the cover price. We like how much content is jammed into every issue, we have no interest in cutting our pay rates (we wish they could be higher!), so there was only one logical choice. After talking to our distributors and then crunching the numbers, we’ll be raising the cover price to $9.95 starting with issue #68, which will be headed to the printer later this month. We will not be cutting any content and all of the regular features you’ve come to expect will still be in each and every issue. (Plus, like we mentioned above, there are some surprises in store that we know you’re going to love!)
Here’s the really good news for our subscribers: subscription prices will not be changing at all, which means your subscription rate is now a huge savings off the list price. (If you buy a 6 issue US subscription for $27, that’s like paying for less than three issues and getting the rest for free.)
Finally, we’ve had many requests for an electronic edition of the magazine. We’re still getting everything in order, but we can tell you that all future issues (starting with 68) will be available in some electronic format and we’re working on electronic versions of every issue after CD #61 as well.
We’ll post more updates about the above mentioned Special Issues, our electronic plans for the magazine, and our plans to re-open the magazine to fiction submissions later this year. If you have any questions or comments in the meantime, please feel free to contact Brian James Freeman: [email protected]
Thank you, as always, for your continuing support!
“Cemetery Dance has been quite brilliant in their subtle marketing approach to this book, relying on the strength of the authors’ names (and of their previous collaboration, The Woman, which Cemetery Dance also published) and keeping the details of the story largely under wraps. I’m not about to undo those efforts by going into a detailed synopsis here… In both the novella and the short story, Ketchum and McKee meld their styles into a single powerful voice. The fiction they create together continues to be compelling and fearless, going places where writers with weaker hearts (and weaker talents) dare not tread. Here’s hoping they’ve just found their groove, and that their muses continue to connect on many, many projects to come.
