🔮 And on the Seventh Year, We Rested

Dear readers,

Once upon a time, two friends decided to take a round on what seemed like a fun little ride. They didn’t know it was a rollercoaster, and they certainly didn’t realise quite how long it would turn out to be. Along the way, they were joined by new friends from far and wide. Together, they weathered every swooping low and heart-stopping high. But as with all good things, the ride had to come to an end — with a somewhat sudden jolt, as rollercoasters tend to.

Snipette completes 6 years today, and the ride has been nothing if not exhilarating! However, we’ve unfortunately had to make the hard decision to cease our operations here. Come July, Snipette will stop accepting and publishing new articles (we’ll continue with our regular schedule till then).

The reason is that much of our team will be starting college this August, and we understand firsthand just how much schedules and latitudes will change. Working on Snipette might be fun, but it’s also a great deal of work for everyone involved, too. Ultimately, this has always been something we do for love, and we never want to see it become a chore.

By the time you read this, we will have published 340 articles in all, one every single week without fail since 2017. These will still be around, lingering in our little corner of the internet waiting to be found. It’s in the nature of Snipette articles that they stay relevant over time, so we hope their impact on people’s thoughts and ideas doesn’t fade. The community we’ve built, over a shared love for writing and exploring the world in new and interesting ways, will remain forever.

In a way, then, it wasn’t just a rollercoaster. We built a little world along the way, tangible and very real. And now, our work is complete.

Before we close, we’d like to take a moment and look back at what we’ve achieved.

In the past seven years, we worked with over 82 authors, not counting the Snipette staff themselves. We have published 340 posts in six years, never missing a beat (save for one time when we miscoordinated timezones with an author, and had to put out a backup piece the next day instead).

Come July, we’d have brought out 14 issues of our print version. Each quarter, the machine we assembled churned out and distributed copies of over dozen different stories across the world. That’s across 14 different timezones from every continent on this planet (with the unfortunate exception of Antarctica).

We managed to run an operation that financially sustained itself, as well as gathered surplus funds to take on new and exciting projects. We hosted two webinars and a fundraising event. For a publication that started as a blog between two teenagers, we’ve certainly come a long way.

And we couldn’t have done it without you! To the people who have supported us, emotionally and financially, we owe you all a very sincere thank you. Without you all, we doubt that Snipette would have made it this far. Although the publication will no longer be continuing, we hope that it stays in your heart forever.

We would be amiss if, now that our world is complete, we didn’t say a bit about its future.

To all our readers, old and new: while we won’t be putting out new content, all the existing articles will remain online. We’re working on redesigning the website to make it more archival-friendly, and we’ve also allocated funds to keep it up and running for the next 15 years. (If you got yourself a print version, good for you — that will last practically forever). We’re also storing physical backups of raw print and artwork files, in case they become useful in future, and are happy to note that the Internet Archive has already indexed a lot of our pages.

To our authors, with whom we’ve had not just interesting ideas but also wonderful conversations: we may not be editing Snipette, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t editing! If you have a new draft you want looked over, or a new idea to explore, feel free to hit us up — we’d be happy to hear from you!

To those who have pending payments or transactions with us: You can expect to receive an email from us soon. If you have an ongoing subscription, it will continue till the next issue of Analog; after that, your subscription will be closed and we’ll send you a refund on whatever’s left. Digital subscriptions which just expired will be extended by 3 months so they can receive the last issue as well! As for crowdfunders: since we won’t be able to grow Snipette as planned, it doesn’t make sense for us to hold on to the money, so we will be offering all of you a full refund.

Last but not the least, to those of you who’ve subscribed to our email list, receiving every article as soon as it’s published: Of course, you won’t be getting those any more. But if you’re a subscriber or hesitating on filling the “subscribe” box, we’d love for you to keep your email in there.

We don’t know what will happen or what the future looks like, but it would be nice to keep some connection going. Stay subscribed and, perhaps, one day, you’ll find something interesting in your inbox.

Making all things new,
Manasa, Dee, Anjali, Rhea, Badri, Nia, Diya, neel, and Sabyasachi
The Snipette Team