As most of you have heard, Fangoria is coming back with new owners and a new business model. The reign of the classic horror magazine ended in 2017 with a long hiatus, but Cinestate and Phil Nobile, Jr. will be leading the way with a new series of issues with supposed limited advertisements, a boatload of pages, and an arguably steep price tag.
The Fangoria Twitter page and an email sent out to subscribers states that Fangoria will be back in print in quarterly release: October, January, April, and July. Each will have a single-issue price tag of $20, but right now they haven’t even figured out how the book will be marketed to those who just want to pick up the issues one at a time. Instead, they’re offering the whole package as a full year subscription at $60, which means you’ll save about $20 on cover price (not factoring in shipping costs). They’ve also noted that advertisements are going to be at a minimum so you get more articles for your buck.
This begs the question: will fans even buy a subscription at $60 for four issues? That’s a steep price to pay for a lot of information that readers can find for free on the Internet (like at Cultsploitation!), and the quarterly release dates mean that a lot of Fangoria‘s content will need to be advance looks at movies released in the future to stay relevant. There’s no more room to write movie reviews of films that released months previously. It seems like a shaky business model, one that already threatens to make the magazine obsolete before it even releases. Now, Fangoria will also be maintaining a website, Twitter, Facebook, etc; but with all of those things being able to post concurrently, what use does the magazine serve, especially for such a high price tag?
I know I’m going to be holding back on subscribing until I know more about the content of the issues; $60 is just too steep for me to trust in this excursion. Will you be picking up the new Fangoria, or will you be sticking to free websites like this one and other small, independent bloggers?
