16 January 2024 newsletters
I briefly mentioned this in passing, but I’m officially launching some membership tiers to help support and offset the costs of running foofaraw with paid contributors. The first tier follows Manuel Moreale’s lead where you can contribute at $1/month. The second tier, aptly titled A Little Letter of Nonsense is a physical letter, mini-zine, and grub drawing, all delivered to you in the mail (in black & white and US only). It’s launching at an early bird price of $3/month, which you can lock in if you subscribe before the price is raised in March.
So what can you expect with A Little Letter of Nonsense? It’ll be a one page letter of my ramblings about whatever is on my mind that month. The back of the letter will include a digital collage or design similar to what I’ve featured in my digital nonsense. zines in the past. The mini-zines will be made by hand and photocopied1—the first of which will include my top ten lists of 2023. Lastly, the Grub will come in many different shapes and forms. One month might be an original sketch to each subscriber another might be a printed recreation of a Pokémon card. I’ve got tons of ideas for where I can take these.
Lastly, both tiers will come with dumb little useless stuff like access to a “super-secret” discord channel, where you can ask me for recommendations or help you decide what to read/watch next, and discounts on commissions and future zines…
Awhile back, Maya had mentioned this service Stamp Fans and it got me thinking a lot about the single page zines I experimented with and a couple of the WIP full-fledged zines I have going right now. So I started to consider how I might do it if I ran the whole operation myself rather than let Stamp Fans get the first $3 of every subscription.
Combine all that with foofaraw, which has been growing as I’ve brought in new paid contributors (who I’ve loved getting the chance to publish in Friday issues) I started looking for some ways to offset the growing costs of running the newsletter. I know paying people for the newsletter will almost always be a money losing endeavor for me, which I don’t mind because I like getting to help put cool things out into the world, but a dream of mine would be to treat it more like a magazine, adding even more paid contributors so each Friday issue could include multiple people with all sorts of different things, like art, comics, fiction, essays, etc. Adding a paid tier to the newsletter through Buttondown itself was an option, but that just felt like complicating matters and the KoFi solution gives me a little bit more flexibility without seemingly putting up a paywall on the newsletter.
With all that being said foofaraw will always be free and will always include the monday media guide that started it all.
Ultimately, if you enjoy what I do with foofaraw, The Independent Variable or The New Grub Times, this is the best way to help support those efforts and support the contributors whose work I feature.
There’s a chance very few people sign-up for this… resulting in the effort of creating these things being a bit too much. If that ends up being the case, I’ll ensure all monthly payments are fulfilled and then shut it down after a few months.
I reserve the right to incorporate some digital stuff with them too↩︎