DD Blog: Shifting Dear Damsels and a change to our work
Things at Dear Damsels are changing – sort of.
At the start of this (long) year, we shared a blog about launching a Patreon, which came out of a desire to do more of what we love (championing women writers) and to improve what we currently offer – while also moving Dear Damsels to a space where it becomes more self-sustaining.
This was the beginning of a change in focus for DD, one that we’ve been planning for a long time. Publishing Let Me Know When You’re Home in February proved that there’s an audience for the kind of books that we want to work on: books that allow us to bring a collection of women’s voices together in one place and share them with the world. We’ve decided that publishing is the strand of our platform that we want to dedicate more of our time to in the future, to give women writers more opportunities to share their writing, receive feedback and connect with readers.
So what does that mean for DD? Well, in the spirit of our most recent theme on the site, we’ll be going through our own shift.
More books, less feedback
We’ll be publishing more books, and publishing a little less online. These books will include collections like Let Me Know When You’re Home and What She’s Having, and we’re also looking to publish individual authors and poets in the future, too – more on that soon!
We’ll still be holding regular online submission periods, and everyone who submits will still receive a response from us. However, in order to focus our efforts on our print publishing, we no longer have the capacity to provide individual feedback for our online submissions. We’ll be moving individual submission feedback into the membership offer for those who support us on Patreon.
Providing feedback has always been central to what we do and we will continue to be a supportive, community-focused platform – however, it takes up a huge amount of our time currently, and when it came to considering how we can manage a fuller focus on print publishing, we realised that we’ll sadly no longer have capacity to respond individually as we have done in the past. We’ve decided to focus on providing our tailored feedback for our patrons as it is their support that has allowed us the time and financial backing to do the work for our next publication, What She’s Having, and will continue to be essential as we start to prioritise this strand.
Farewell to the DD Annual (for now)
We’ve also decided that our most recent DD Annual, the DD Annual 2020, will be the last yearly collection we publish. We adored working on the annuals – the months we spent pulling them together, compiling our favourite writing from each year’s submissions with original photography, illustration and artwork from incredibly talented women, was a complete labour of love.
However, due to the format of the Annuals, they barely break even in terms of the time, effort and money we spend on them. We’ve made the hard choice to put the Annuals on hold so we can channel our energy and finances into supporting our original publications. You’ll still be able to buy past issues of the Annual (there might even be a little seasonal offer coming up soon!) and potentially one day we’ll be able to restart this project.
Thank you
We hope you’ll continue to support us through this shift – as we’ve said before, we absolutely love what we do and are so proud of what DD has already achieved.
We believe that this change will help us secure the future of this platform, so that more women can go on to share their words, come together, use their voice, and get a resounding response back.
If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch.
Love,
Abs and Bri x
Dear Damsels is your collective.
We wanted to create a space on our website where you can find out what your collective is doing for you. Whether it’s upcoming events, publications, or podcast episodes, this blog is where we communicate directly with you about what is going on in the world of DD.