Announcement
8 months have passed since the birth of Citadel21. As of now, we have released 8 online volumes and 4 physical volumes, featuring contributions from 86 rock solid Bitcoiners. The support and love from all you Cyber Hornets have been amazing. Thank you!
Launching and running such a project is a learning journey in many ways. We basically just decided to trust our vision and jump into the deep end, tackling the challenges as they appeared. And it has worked great! We have learned though, and we have also been hit with some curveballs and challenges that we didn’t anticipate. If we want to keep Citadel21 going (and we definitely do) we have to react and adapt to the things we learn along the way, and to developments that affect our project. This is why we have two announcements today.
1. Change in release schedule
Citadel21 will change from monthly publication to bi-monthly publication. This means vol.9 will drop on January 21st instead of December 21st, and then every second month after that on the 21st. Our reasoning for this is two-fold:
We want the release of a new volume to be something people look forward to and anticipate. Our current monthly releases, paired with monthly (or more frequent) release of physical volumes, seems to be a somewhat overwhelming pace for people to digest.
Monthly releases is extremely work intensive, and we would rather slow down the pace and provide even higher quality, while also not burning out in the process of doing so.
Physical releases will continue to drop at the monthly pace until they have caught up to online releases (currently 4 volumes behind), at which point we will start releasing the physical zines before the online version, giving exclusivity to our customers!
All our subscribers will obviously receive the full number of zines they have paid for!
2. Change in print and distribution
We have been very happy with our printing and distribution partner Konsensus Network. They are based in Finland, which up to now has been where all our physical zines have been printed and shipped from. Unfortunately, last week we got the word that Finnish Postal Services are not only raising their prices due to “the pandemic”, but also introducing what we can only call draconian measures for non-EU shipments. Standard customs slips are not enough anymore, but information on all receivers have to be filed electronically for each shipment, starting January, 2021. This is obviously not something we want to do with the personal details of our customers, and we also do not have the margins to accomodate higher shipping costs.
So, Citadel21 is currently in the process of finding a new printing and distribution partner. We are aiming to find a US partner, since most of our customers are US, and we are currently discussing and exploring with potential partners.
Thank you for your continued support,
Citadel21 team