Needless to say the last few years for SCA have been a wild ride atop a restless sea of change. Rising printing costs collided with a worldwide undercurrent of readers moving away from paper publications to spend their time online. As a result we were forced to make a quick tack—fortunately we found this burgeoning Substack platform.
Once we’d all licked our wounds and lamented the end of the print magazine we got to work sourcing good daily small-boat and sailing articles (including some “best-of” archival content) for this digital publication.
We’ve continued with the adventure stories and technical articles of course, but also tried to take advantage of the new format’s interactive nature to build a community, with feedback and suggestions through the polls and in the real-time comments section beneath each article. Features like our Book Stacks, Mini-Cruiser Madness, and Classified Ads Blast are possible in this format only, as are the downloadable PDFs we can include at the end of certain articles.
As we’ve gone online we’ve also looked to be less provincial, with even more small-boat content from elsewhere around the world—including fantastic regular dispatches from Keith Muscott and the U.K.’s Dinghy Cruising Association.
Today we just wanted to say “thank you” to readers and contributors (many of you are both) for staying the course with us as we reach new goals. Earlier this year we were awarded Substack’s “Featured Publication” designation, and just this week we achieved “Bestseller” status with thousands of paid subscribers. And thank you to so many of you who added your supportive comments with your renewals. We have some exciting content planned and we look forward to sharing it with our friends and readers.
—Josh, Marty and the SCA Crew
•SCA•
I love this version, with more activity and engagement, less paper waste and environmental impact, searchable database, and no need for huge stacks of magazines lying around taking up space. Anyone who decided to unsubscribe because of a format change wasn’t interested enough in the content anyway. I have hundreds of books on my kindle, and all the SCA articles uploaded so far on my phone, instantly accessible. Evolve, keep up, or be left behind. Change will happen with or without you, embrace it, or lose out.
Like a lot of people, I am somewhat resistant to change, so I was initially quite disappointed when I learned that the print version of SCA was no more. But, I understand why this had to happen and I have to say I do enjoy this new on line version coming to my inbox almost daily. While I still miss the print version I think that this on line version is actually better in so many ways. I like that it is more interactive, too. Please keep it coming. As my British friends say, "proper job."