Reaching us
Contact and submissions
By post, mostly. It is slower and it produces better letters.
Editorial and subscriptions
Off-Peak Journal
First floor, 14a Colston Yard
Bristol BS1 5AN
United Kingdom
The office is above a bicycle shop and is staffed on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Please do not send parcels that need signing for on other days.
Subscriptions
Two issues a year, nine pounds each, eighteen for the year including postage within the United Kingdom and twenty-six elsewhere. Send a note with your address and we will send an invoice; payment by bank transfer or by cheque, which several readers still prefer and which we are happy to keep accepting.
There is no online checkout. This is occasionally inconvenient and it means we hold no card details, no account passwords and no order database beyond a list of names and postal addresses in a filing cabinet and a spreadsheet.
Back issues: eleven, twelve and thirteen are still in print. Issues one to ten are gone and will not be reprinted.
When we get it wrong
Send them. Say which issue, which page, and what you know that we did not. We correct in field notes immediately and in the following issue in print, with the reader credited unless they would rather not be. Roughly a third of our corrections come from readers and the rest from the fact-checking pass, which is a ratio we are not proud of.
Pitches
We read everything and we are slow. Six weeks is normal; eight is not unusual around an issue closing.
What helps: a paragraph on the place, a paragraph on the season and why that season rather than the obvious one, and a paragraph on what you would actually do there for the three weeks we would send you. What does not help: a list of everything you could write about, or a proposal for a piece you have already written.
We do not accept pieces arising from press trips, hosted stays or arranged hospitality, and we ask directly at the point of acceptance. This is not a moral position about other publications; it is that we cannot check a piece we cannot reconstruct from a receipt.
Advertising
None, in print or here, and there is no arrangement under which that changes. We have been asked eleven times this year and the answer has been the same eleven times.
Stockists
Around forty independent bookshops and two dozen bicycle shops, which is a distribution strategy that emerged by accident and turns out to work. If you run a shop and would like copies, write and we will send a sale-or-return form. Minimum order is five.