Scottish magazine Extra Teeth goes on hiatus due to 'challenging' funding landscape

Scottish literary magazine Extra Teeth is going on hiatus until 2024 due to the “challenging” arts and culture funding landscape in Scotland.

Readers can still buy back issues and bundles, and subscribers will have their subscriptions paused for one year. The magazine will not be open for submissions during this period or running its mentorship scheme.

A note on its website explained that Issue Eight marked the end of the magazine’s second Creative Scotland funding period. “We are happy to have had four of our eight issues funded; we are equally happy to have (just about) been able to afford to put two issues out in between with no capital or funding, while trying to raise fees for our writers and illustrators, manage personnel changes, build a larger team and pay them properly and improve how we do things. But all of this has, if we’re honest, taken its toll.”

It continued: “It has always been our ethos to pay our contributors for their work; we pay £110 per piece to our writers and £750 to our illustrators, and we wish we could pay more. Working out how to balance this sustainably against Brexit, massively rising costs and a cost of living crisis has been a challenge. Trying to stabilise the magazine while doing so has required an even greater effort.”

The editorial team pointed to several other small publications that had gone on hiatus or ceased trading in the last year, noting: “The arts/culture funding landscape in Scotland is more challenging than ever. This is a country that vocally champions its cultural sector, indeed runs its capital city around a singular month of cultural output, yet only spends 0.58% (yes, zero point five eight) of its budget on arts and culture.

"Competition for funding is intense, and applications take weeks of unpaid labour to put in, with no guarantee of receiving the funding. As a publication, if we do too well or sell too many magazines, the last part of our promised funding is diminished, which makes long-term planning a challenge. As Creative Scotland moves to its multi-year funding scheme, it has estimated that it can only provide one third of what is being asked for, meaning a huge amount of organisations are set to potentially lose funding. As it stands, we are not eligible for even this wildly oversubscribed scheme.”

The magazine pointed to the flourishing of literary magazines in Ireland that are funded from the Arts Council. Earlier this week, Booker Prize-winner Paul Lynch told journalists how he was supported with two bursaries from the Arts Council while writing Prophet Song (Oneworld).

“This supports and sustains writers in a way that just does not happen in Scotland,” Extra Teeth magazine said. “And many of us who are trying to support them on far, far less money are finding ourselves running out of both cash and energy. We are extremely burned out, and can’t run on passion alone.”

The magazine was started in 2019. The editorial team insisted “we want to restructure the Extra Teeth organisation and to look for longer-term, sustainable funding”. They said: “Giving ourselves a year off from producing the magazine means that we can do all this restructuring work properly, and in a way that is thorough and considered. We also will benefit, as individuals and as a magazine, from space to breathe, and to think about how we do things. We have already had long conversations about how we can better reach and support underrepresented writers; about how we can not only publish but develop writers from communities that are left behind by the publishing industry. This is something that we think is worthwhile – and putting in place these processes will take time.”