SO\SO Serial

From Bill Simmons

This is from an article Simmons wrote on Grantland back in November. It gives all us 30 year old broke writers hope!

Last night I spent 25 minutes flipping through a three-month slice of my life. McSweeney’s shipped us an advance copy of the Grantland Quarterly, which contains our favorite selections from our launch (June 8) through Labor Day Weekend. The book feels like a basketball and looks like … well, it looks like a quarterly. Only a fancy one. With drawings, pictures, graphics, footnotes, colored pages and everything else you’d come to expect from McSweeney’s. The book costs $20 for Volume I (plus shipping), or $48 for a yearly subscription (plus shipping).

Your default mechanism might be “That’s a lot of money” or “Why would I pay for stuff I already read?” Believe me, I get it — I hate making people pay for content. Actually, I hate making people pay for anything. Once upon a time, I was creditors-chasing-me-down-for-outstanding-bills-from-two-years-ago broke. I remember being 30 years old and still looking forward to Papa Gino’s “All You Can Eat Pizza” night for $5.99 (I think it was Tuesdays) and thinking, I graduated from college eight years ago, there’s something totally wrong with this picture. One of our biggest goals for Grantland was figuring out how to keep it free — which wasn’t that hard, actually. We only needed to find a few willing sponsors ahead of time (thank you, Subway, Unilever and Lexus), integrate them within our website and figure out various ways to make them happy. Heading into 2012, we’re going to find more of them. This site will always remain free. Always.