In Alternate History discussions, we ususally preface a discussion of a story or situation with the root of the alternative - what event happened differently in a specific timeline to create the different situation.

In my case, if my mom's best friend had not moved to South Dakota and met my wife's mother, the three of them would have never had the opportunity to matchmake - and I would have never met my wife. That breakpoint I call the point of divergence, or POD for short.

The term seems to have caught on....and I used it for the title of this APA when I started it in 1995.

• POINT OF DIVERGENCE was started in 1995 as an amateur press association (APA) - a written 'many-to-many' aimed at the alternate history / alternate worlds enthusiast. POINT OF DIVERGENCE is a (cocktail party / BBS / Usenet Newsgroup) on paper - an area to discuss Alternate History topics, as well as a forum for writers in the genre to workshop their stories and gain constructive criticism from the membership.
• POINT OF DIVERGENCE is a participation magazine - you read the last issue, and write up your comments on other people's fiction, commentary, etc., and add to it your own fiction, commentary, theories, etc.You then repro up thirty (30) copies of your written contribution to the 'official editor', who combines your efforts with other people's writings every two months, and then sends the combined APA (for amateur press association) bundle back out to the membership.
• But POINT OF DIVERGENCE is NOT a subscription magazine (even though I get requests every month from people who want to subscribe to the APA), and here's why:

While I personally would love to see a professional Alternate History magazine on the newsstands, the problem is that publishing a magazine is very very expensive. Aside of keeping a roof over the editor/publisher's heads, any other office overhead (rent for the office, phones, etc.), and paying the writers (always a good idea), simply putting the thing on paper and mailing it out (postal costs) or making sure that it ends up in that corner drugstore is (1) hard, and (2) way expensive.

The cost of paper and printing is something that you probably don't think about, but it's not cheap, and it's getting more expensive all the time. Fancy art needs fancy slick-feeling paper to work right, and that costs still more. And mailing - that's really expensive.

Give you a quick example...a normal copy of POINT OF DIVERGENCE these days is around 300 pages, and costs $5 US to mail out to people in the USA, and up to three times that to members overseas. Take a 300 page document to your local copy shop, and make - oh, 2,000 copies (if you don't make at least 2000 copies, any stories in the magazine don't count towards that writer being considered a professional, which means that the better writers won't send you stories you can publish). Figure out how much that would cost to print and mail out 2000 copies, and you start to get an idea of what I'm talking about.

Checking ANALOG's figures, a two-year subscription costs $50 in the US, and buying it off the newsstand would cost $67. They pull this off by selling some advertising, but mostly by making a deal with the printers, the Post Office and so on by doing it in bulk quantities. It's also big enough that the magazine distributors will go for it - a new magazine would have to be 'worth their while' or a 'proven product' to pick up. Add in advertising costs, because nobody's heard of your magazine...it all adds up. Paper's expensive too, and they use very cheap pulp paper.

Now, if someone like Ross Perot or Bill Gates handed me a few zillion and said 'go for it', or I won the lottery, I'd do it in a second. But I'm not quitting my day job and going tens and tens of thousands of dollars in debt (at least) to try it on my own.

Since the members only produce thirty copies of their contributions, and there are over twenty members, that means there's only a few that don't go directly to members. Almost all of those are passed out to people who are interested in joining as speculation copies. So no, I don't really have extras for sale. And making extra copies beyond that would be difficult, and expensive ($30 a copy), and I'm not about to do it. And you're not about to pay those sorts of prices for a magazine. Nobody would.

One last reason that POINT OF DIVERGENCE is not a small-press subscription magazine - it is designed for workshopping Alternate History stories - to get criticism and suggestions on style, readability, and historical content (and realism/logic of the history you created). So if I sell copies of it out to subscribers, and the writers in POINT OF DIVERGENCE want to send their stories later to ANALOG or ASIMOV'S, they won't be able to - those magazines would say that 'this story has been published elsewhere, and we're not interested in re-publishing it'. By limiting it to the contributors, we get around that restriction.

So please don't ask if you can subscribe to POINT OF DIVERGENCE; you can't, for all of the above reasons.