I recently came across an article about the Beatles fan club¹. Among other things, I learned that The Beatles recorded various spoken and musical tracks which were sent to the members of their official fan clubs in the UK and US at Christmastime. These recordings were created exclusively for their fans, not for retail sale, and were a way of making sure that fan club members got something special from the band even though the immense volume of fan mail couldn’t be answered individually.

A special bond forms when creators and audiences connect and interact, something that perhaps lies at the very heart of art itself. And while modern technology has given us so many ways to connect with each other, the sheer volume of communication can turn these contacts into impersonal, intrusive noise, pushing us apart instead of gathering us into a community.

Community has been at the heart of Works That Work from the beginning. Our community of subscribers enabled us to launch the magazine, and in a very real sense we produce this magazine for them. They get each issue weeks before we ship to anyone else, and the lively conversation they carry on with us through our website, blog and social media continues to shape and drive our work. Still, we feel that they deserve even more from us, so starting in October we’ll be delivering new material online every month just for them. These articles, which won’t appear in the magazine (or anywhere else for that matter), will include more Artefacts from Anne Miltenburg, as well as behind the scenes stories from the making of other articles. For example, we currently have a writer in Albania researching the 700,000 bunkers built during the Enver Hoxha regime, and we’ll post the story from the trip before the article appears in Issue 3.

These stories will be available to subscribers only. Subscribing is super easy, just log in to your account and turn the subscription ON. If you don't have an account, set one up by clicking ‘Subscribe’. If you aren’t sure about your subscription status, send a blank email to subscribe@worksthatwork.com and you’ll receive an automated email about your status. Unsubscribing also takes just a click of a button, no questions asked.

We’re as excited about these new articles as we are about the regular content of the magazine. If you enjoy Works That Work but aren’t yet a subscriber, join us to get more of it more often.

*We are changing our publishing schedule from Winter/Summer to Spring/Autumn. This means that Issue 3 will be out in March 2014, two months later than originally planned.