Check out “The Mary Sue Live,” My Favorite Subscriber Benefit
We’ve talked a lot about what the Mary Sue subscription service does for our site, but you may still be wondering what it can do for you, our readers. When subscriptions launched, we didn’t want to fragment our wonderful community by putting any of our site’s content behind a paywall, but we did introduce something new for subscribers: The Mary Sue Live.
At least, that’s what I’ve taken to calling the live video chats with our editors, which have been a lot of fun for everyone involved—well, they’ve definitely been fun for us. I can’t vouch for viewers 100%, but the feedback so far has been incredibly positive. Once a month, our editors have gone completely off-book on Google Hangouts to talk in-depth about current events and reader questions in a way we just can’t do on the site—or even in the text chat we use for all work communications—and broadcast it all live for subscribers to watch and have their comments and questions answered in real-time. (If you can’t make the scheduled time, we also accept questions beforehand and provide the full episodes in replay.)
Our editorial staff is all spread out across the U.S. in New York, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and different areas of California, and these live chats have been a way for us to get together with each other as much as with our readers. It’s an unprecedented window into our world, and we decided to share it with subscribers because, very plainly, we think our little world is fun. Every day, the five of us (with the help of some part-time and non-editorial staff) practically will the Mary Sue into existence out of our collective desire to be nerds, to have fun, and to make the world a better place, and sharing that team dynamic is a great feeling.
That’s why we put this little highlight reel together (thanks to Alec, our video producer). The description of “editor live chats” doesn’t quite do justice to what I personally think is our best subscriber bonus, so I thought showing would be better than telling in this case. If you like what you see above, enjoy the site, and can spare $4.99 a month to subscribe (which also gets you an ad-free site and weekday subscriber newsletter), we’d appreciate your support and look forward to chatting with you.
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