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New experimental literary journal
Recently I've become involved in a project which I hope will survive. After spending a year in Paris my partner has decided to begin a new literary journal. Partly this is a creative exercise for her but for myself, as the production controller, I'm trying to turn it into an experiment in building an online format and to sidestep international borders.
So progress so far, if anyone can think of other thing to please let me know, I can be your guinea pig.
• There is a website, www.nopoetrymag.com to act as hub
• The magazine will be available through lulu.com or magcloud
and the electronic version, we'll run through Stanza and make available in all formats possible.
• We'll also be trying to get the magazine sold through stores in Australia
• We have begun a social networking page (ie Facebook) and are looking for offline newsletters to get the word out (already mad it into one university newspaper)
We were going to explore the Adobe pdf ad option but, again, it is a program reserved for Americans only (flat earth my backside!). But that would have been a fascinating test, especially for content that will be available in perpetuity.
There are two major risks as far as I can see. 1) Getting good submissions and 2) Distribution and popularity (and thus profitability).
I guess I'm posting for advice, so I'll ask some explicit questions. Are we crazy? What else can we do to make it work? Does anybody even read literary journals these days? Is giving the electronic version away for free really a good idea?
So progress so far, if anyone can think of other thing to please let me know, I can be your guinea pig.
• There is a website, www.nopoetrymag.com to act as hub
• The magazine will be available through lulu.com or magcloud
and the electronic version, we'll run through Stanza and make available in all formats possible.
• We'll also be trying to get the magazine sold through stores in Australia
• We have begun a social networking page (ie Facebook) and are looking for offline newsletters to get the word out (already mad it into one university newspaper)
We were going to explore the Adobe pdf ad option but, again, it is a program reserved for Americans only (flat earth my backside!). But that would have been a fascinating test, especially for content that will be available in perpetuity.
There are two major risks as far as I can see. 1) Getting good submissions and 2) Distribution and popularity (and thus profitability).
I guess I'm posting for advice, so I'll ask some explicit questions. Are we crazy? What else can we do to make it work? Does anybody even read literary journals these days? Is giving the electronic version away for free really a good idea?
Comment
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Comment by Mac Slocum on October 21, 2008 at 2:28pm -
Kudos for experimenting! We're doing some experimentation ourselves within TOC (only fitting since we're always telling other publishers to go this route). It's tricky business because there are so many possibilities and so few guidelines.
Re: the free distribution -- I think the "free" question can be reshaped into an "expectation" question: What do people expect from digital content and what do they expect from print content?
There are very few examples of pay-to-play working with digital content, especially if the content is for entertainment or leisure (actionable content, such as business data, falls into a different domain). I just don't think people are willing to pay for this stuff because:
1) they haven't paid for it elsewhere
2) the correlation between "entertainment experience" and "digital content" doesn't justify a purchase because a similar experience can presumably be located elsewhere for free.
But things are different on the print side, particularly when the print edition has a collectible quality (high-grade stock, nice binding, etc.). In this case, there's a tangible aspect that people (some people at least) are willing to pay for.
Now, this isn't an established model (I hesitate to even dub this a "model" since it's so ambiguous), but you could release free digital content with the intent to upsell a small percentage of your readers to the print edition. You'd have to configure your economics to make this viable, but I think it might work.
You could also create separate editions -- digital content could come out in an ongoing stream and best-of-the-best print editions could come out quarterly. If things ramp up -- and the technology is in place -- you could allow readers to bundle their favorite digital content into a bundled book that's available for a fee (a low fee for digital-only, and a higher fee for print).
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