After two years of semi-regular activity, Supraterranean will be undergoing a period of downtime. I think of it as a sort of “existential crisis.” The site’s history has been a strange one, starting as a professional project to finish my masters of journalism program and continuing as an experiment in independent online publishing. While the site has always been a bit “eccentric,” I still believe in the ideas behind the site just as much as during the initial planning phase in summer 2008.

Reception was great at first, and both submissions and readers were gradually growing. But it took me about 30 hours per month to create each issue using table-based HTML pages, and the site was weak on interactivity and other features. So I updated the site to WordPress in September 2009, offering bigger pictures, RSS feeds, and more.

But for one reason or another, people seemed much less excited after the switch, and the site didn’t evolve into the creative community I had envisioned. I’ve never really figure out why (but then again, I never got a survey together). I started curating content from around the web that had been posted with a Creative Commons license, or that was openly available with embed codes from Vimeo or YouTube. I had trouble explaining what I was attempting to do—a mix of original publishing open to all, and re-hosting creative work from around the world.

I kept my chin up and continued to publish my own writing and other work on the site, and I started recruiting more writers for the internal blogroll. Then this fall I launched a micro-site called Oneirisms, where people would be able to post their dream stories. Needless to say, it never took off.

My other concern is that it suddenly makes less sense to have a site for open self-publishing without a specific theme or topic. People coming to Supraterranean don’t really know what to expect, which is fun for some but not for everyone. I thought about narrowing the submission guidelines to say we’ll publish anything within a certain range of topics, but then that would create a paradox, since it wouldn’t be “self-publishing open to all.”

Since I have no outside funding for the site (no one has expressed interest in being a sponsor), there’s a chance that I’ll have to shut it down in the spring. While we’ve been open for donations for the past two years, we’ve only received a small amount—not nearly enough to cover web hosting costs. Furthermore, this whole “web manager” business was a sort of cul-de-sac in my own life—a path that didn’t materialize the way I had hoped.

It’s strange to announce this now, since I just wrote “A Supraterranean Manifesto” in June and, as I said before, I still believe in the ideas behind the site and I’ll likely try to manifest those ideas in other ways in the years to come.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I may change my mind at some point, but for now my gut is telling me to lock it down—and I always follow my gut.

Best regards,
Nick Meador
Supraterranean Founder