R.I.P. C&S

We’ve enjoyed editor Tony Burton’s Crime and Suspense Webzine, but apparently we won’t be able to much longer. Burton has sent this note to his regular readers:

Well, my attempt to obtain enough paying subscribers for the ezine (at $5 per year) has failed.

I want to thank all of you who DID commit to pay for subscriptions, all fifty-three of you. Your encouragement and support is much appreciated.

While a couple of people DID offer to pay more than the $5 annual subscription fee to help keep the ezine running, I didn’t want to do it that way. If the ezine isn’t worth 42 cents a month to everyone who subscribes to it, what’s the point? That’s less than the cost of a can of soda, after all.

So, my guess is that a lot of people must have subscribed to the ezine on a whim, or perhaps when their story was published, and then forgot about it. I’m not sure. But whatever the reason, I didn’t meet my self-established minimum of one hundred paying customers by July 7, so the ezine is dying a quiet death.

There will be at least one more issue, in August, as long as I can get enough stories to fill it. And I’ll do September, too, if I can, but right now the story submission pile is rather shallow.

I plan on keeping the Web site up and running, if not updated, through the rest of the year if I can. That way everyone will have access to the archives to print a copy of the ezine containing their story for a clip if they wish.

I want to thank each of you who participated as a reader, a writer, a reviewer or in whatever way you participated. Your contributions were gratefully received and if you wrote, were read with pleasure.

There will be no more serials, as there are not enough issues left to run them.

I sympathize with Burton’s plight. It’s damnably hard to put together a quality periodical, and it’s even harder--ultimately--when you’re doing it without financial recompense. But there’s so much free material available on the Web, that it’s difficult for small players (that is, smaller than The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal) to charge for their efforts. No matter how good the work is that they’re presenting. Crime and Suspense isn’t the first crime-fiction Webzine to disappear because its principals had to go off and make a living, and I fear it likely won’t be the last.

Read Crime and Suspense while you can.