//TIER Report 001

Hi all!

This is the first entry in a new (free) series at TIER. This is where we'll give financial updates, outline future plans, and gab a little about what we've been reading, playing etc. One of our goals this year is to have more consistent output. We both felt that one of the best ways to do that would be to have more off-the-cuff writing/more blog-style articles to fill the space between issues. We also want to have this space to say what we have (or haven't) been working on. The tone of this will be more casual and less edited than our issues.

The first thing on the docket is to give a little report on the survey we recently sent out. If you didn't fill it out (or didn't finish it) you still can here.

First of all, Phoenix and I were overwhelmed and touched at your messages of support. TIER is the smallest of small-time operations. It was wonderful to see that it has touched a few of you deeply. There is an audience for criticism of this kind. We hope to stay small and still find more of you who want to read what we are writing. We are so proud of our body of work. We just want to see it expand and become more consistent over time.

As for big takeaways, a lot of you noted how much you enjoyed our interviews with Nathalie Lawhead and Nilson Carroll. We're happy to say that we will be doing more interviews going forward! The current plan is to do at least one per issue and we already have a couple lined up for the future. Doing those interviews has been some of the most personally rewarding work I've done for TIER. I'm excited to keep it going.

Secondly, a few of you noted how meaningful it is to you that TIER is totally free and accessible. It's an important part of our mission. We currently don't have any plans to paywall any part of the site. If we do lock something behind a paywall, we want it to both be worth your money and something that feels like a bonus. We are still unsure what that would look like. Feedback or suggestions here are welcome.

Thirdly, a lot of you expressed interest in getting physical items and snail mail. A goal of mine since launching TIER has been to sell physical versions of our issues. We would also LOVE to table at cons or even just local arts markets. I think we can set this as a goal for our project. There are, however, a lot of moving parts to making this work. So we can't offer a timeline for when this will happen or how exactly it work. Doing even a miminal version of this would be a serious expansion of our efforts and we want to make sure that we can keep it sustainable.

Lastly, we were excited to see that the Interactive Fiction issue was chosen by the most people as their favorite.

Here are some updates on our future plans:

• We are editing Phoenix's contribution to our 24 Killers issue and it will release later this week, as of writing.
• Grace has yet to finish her contribution but has started. We will finish that by the middle of March.
• We've selected a developer for the rest of March.
• We are working on a special themed issue for April.

Thanks so much for reading TIER,

Grace and Phoenix