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Stone Soup Digital Only Conversion

Stone Soup magazine is available online only starting with the July/August 2017 issue. You may download and print at home a PDF version of every issue, but we will no longer print all our issues centrally and mail them out. Our apps allow you to access Stone Soup offline and (like our website) ad free, on up to 5 devices per subscription. Now we are digital, we will publish 11 times a year (instead of 6) – that means monthly issues from September onwards, and a combined summer issue (July/August). Every year, starting November 2017, we will publish the brand new, print-only Stone Soup Annual, the whole year’s Stone Soup in a beautifully produced book.

A message from Stone Soup Executive Director, William Rubel

The world keeps changing, in particular the publishing world. It has become almost impossible for tiny organisations like ours to manage and produce a bi-monthly print magazine at an affordable subscription rate. Over the last two years our small team tried everything we could think of to keep Stone Soup going in print, but like so many other magazines we have found that we just can’t. Our business choice was stark. Go bankrupt, or evolve with the times and publish digitally. 

But we are not abandoning print altogether. We know how precious it is for you and your young creatives to see their work physically ‘in print’, and we relish the joys of holding a book over looking at a screen. So, starting in November this year, we will be publishing a Stone Soup Annual, containing every issue of the year in color print, and some bonus materials, too. We’ll have more information for you about that in the coming months.

Going digital with our regular magazine has lots of advantages. With their digital subscription, your child will receive a total of 11 issues per year – a monthly edition and a joint Summer issue – giving them almost twice as many issues as before. With access to Stone Soup online they will also have access to our archive of issues going back twenty years: roughly 2,400 pages of Stone Soup stories, poems, and book reviews.

All the same material, and more. With a digital subscription, your child will have access to the same great writing and art they have been used to seeing in print, PLUS a whole range of additional content:

  • Access to 20 years’-worth of back issues
  • New creative streams like
    • Photography
    • Film
    • Music
    • Dance
    • Spoken Word
    • Animation
  • Full searchability by theme across current and archive material, so your very own horse-lover, sporting hero or sci-fi geek can get straight to the kind of content they love most.
  • …and much more

I founded Stone Soup in 1973 while a student at the University of California Santa Cruz. For 44 years we managed the seemingly impossible and made a go of a unique concept: a well-produced print magazine written and illustrated by children, managed under a charitable trust (the Children’s Art Foundation). We are proud of our record of inspiring and supporting children’s creativity over the last four decades, and excited about the opportunities our new digital model plus annual print issue gives us to continue our mission for the future.

Please join us on the next stage of our adventure! Simply follow the instructions in the email we have sent you to set your password, and you’ll have full access to this month’s issue and all the exciting editions to come in the future.

With my thanks, and best wishes from the whole Stone Soup team

William