We're going on hiatus; see you in a year!

Friends, don’t be alarmed. We’re not closing down. But we are taking a break, for reasons of sanity. Let us tell you why.

We started the magazine in 2019 on a wing and a prayer, and with no capital behind us. Thanks to you, wonderful readers, we raised £10,000 to fund the first year of the magazine, and with that boost—we were off.

Issue Eight signals the end of our second Creative Scotland funding period. We are happy to have had four of our eight issues funded; we are equally happy to have (just about) been able to afford to put two issues out in between with no capital or funding, while trying to raise fees for our writers and illustrators, manage personnel changes, build a larger team and pay them properly and improve how we do things. But all of this has, if we’re honest, taken its toll.

It has always been our ethos to pay our contributors for their work; we pay £110 per piece to our writers and £750 to our illustrators, and we wish we could pay more. Working out how to balance this sustainably against Brexit, massively rising costs and a cost of living crisis has been a challenge. Trying to stabilise the magazine while doing so has required an even greater effort.

It won’t have escaped your attention that many small publications had gone on hiatus or ceased trading in the last year. The arts/culture funding landscape in Scotland is more challenging than ever. This is a country that vocally champions its cultural sector, indeed runs its capital city around a singular month of cultural output, yet only spends 0.58% (yes, zero point five eight) of its budget on arts and culture. Competition for funding is intense, and applications take weeks of unpaid labour to put in, with no guarantee of receiving the funding. As a publication, if we do too well or sell too many magazines, the last part of our promised funding is diminished, which makes long-term planning a challenge. As Creative Scotland moves to its multi year funding scheme, it has estimated that it can only provide one third of what is being asked for, meaning a huge amount of organisations are set to potentially lose funding. As it stands, we are not eligible for even this wildly oversubscribed scheme.

When people ask why Ireland has such a thriving literary culture, why literary fiction, both short and long form strives there, we can’t help but point out the flourishing of literary magazines that are funded from the Arts Council from Issue One, paying real professional fees of €300 per piece. This supports and sustains writers in a way that just does not happen in Scotland. And many of us who are trying to support them on far, far less money are finding ourselves running out of both cash and energy. We are extremely burned out, and can’t run on passion alone.

And yet—we love what we do, and are endlessly inspired by the writing we publish. We want to do right by our authors and help more people into this industry. As we look towards the future, we want to restructure the Extra Teeth organisation and to look for longer-term, sustainable funding. All of this takes time, and all of us at Team ET do this outside of our freelance careers / part time or full time jobs and our own writing careers (not to mention supporting our partners/friends/families and trying to live normal human lives). If we want to do this, we need to pause our other activities. There are only so many hours in a week.

Giving ourselves a year off from producing the magazine means that we can do all this restructuring work properly, and in a way that is thorough and considered. We also will benefit, as individuals and as a magazine, from space to breathe, and to think about how we do things. We have already had long conversations about how we can better reach and support underrepresented writers; about how we can not only publish but develop writers from communities that are left behind by the publishing industry. This is something that we think is worthwhile—and putting in place these processes will take time.

So—we are going on hiatus until December 2024. You will still be able to buy our back issues and bundles—and we encourage you to do so here!—but instead of producing issues nine and ten over the next year, we will be squirrelling away behind the scenes instead. We will not open for submissions during this year, nor will we be running mentorship. If you are a previous contributor who needs help with something, as always, you can contact us.

If you are a subscriber, we will pause your subscription for one year, so you will not be charged for the 12 month hiatus. If you have any questions, you can email us at hello@extrateeth.co.uk.

We are so proud of Issue Eight, released in November, and all of the issues we’ve put out since 2019. It is a pleasure to publish such incredible work, and we will continue to do so as of December 2024. In the mean time—stay safe, kids. And if you’re a billionaire who wants to fund a magazine, give us a call.