by David Barron: Magazine

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Magazine

In which David invites the Internet to weigh in or mock a neat idea for a magazine.

The Assumption

I want a magazine. But I also want a magazine in line with Internet Age principles. What are Internet Age principles, you ask? Well, as far as I can tell, nobody knows. That's fine, it's new yet. So let me promulgate my own assumptions before I present the proposal itself.

Assumption 1: Links are valuable things
Links are any method by which people come to a site/product, either physical or hypertext. So a person comes to a site, links to it or talks about it then any people those people know might come to the site, then any people those people know, until signal attenuation dilutes the link energy enough for it to fail. Obviously, this isn't new (it's called "word of mouth") but the Internet Age makes word-of-mouth location independent and more easily consummated.

Assumption 2: An independent Creative builds his/her own network of links.
Your independent Writer, Artist or Musician is trying to build up an audience and also a group of people to test himself on and also a group of general friends. So, he sets up a blog, a Twitter page, and becomes engaged with the community. Again, not new (it's called "self-promotion"), but the Internet Age makes it easier.

Conclusion: Association of Creatives multiplies links.
So all these Writers, Artists and Musicians are self-promoting through word of mouth, and suddenly about eight of them get together and do a project, promoting it through their individual networks. Now all those networks are cross-linked and potentially expanded eightfold. It's social promotion, whoo! In primitive form, it's all this bloglinking that goes on, but we can take it further, thanks to the easy collaboration of the Internet Age.

Bonus Assumption: An Association of Creatives is fun.
Duh.

The Magazine

A collaboration of Creatives who all respect each other's work get together and e-publish a magazine and share the profits and the traffic from the links.

Each month a pool of Writers and a pool of Artists would contribute pieces. For better synergy, writers and artists would team up so the artist could provide individualized artwork for each story or the writer could provide a short story for an artwork, or they could get fancy and bust out a graphic story. A pool of Musicians/Voice Actors could be cultivated to provide audioshort publication, and Video could certainly be incorporated. It's the Internet Age, it can be done, and cheap.

The editor would rotate based on availability and clarity of editorial vision in managing what is essentially a loose anthology format. Technical confidence is nice too, but the layout can be put in template form so it's not that hard to plug in the content. When it was all ready to roll out, the magazine can be published via Smashwords, Kindle, and on a dedicated magazine site. Each Creative in the pool would promote it through his own network along with whatever network the magazine developed.

Profits would be shared equally or donated to a small charity organization chosen by the pool, both for making merit and to bring in yet another network of links into the process. But profits from the endeavor would best be measured in word-of-mouth bringing more eyes to the Creative's other projects via the links embedded in his contribution.

Aside from that, it'd be fun and a great experiment in the Internet Age with very little cost-of-entry/failure all things considered.

And now, an encouraging message from Reel Big Fish to undercut my confidence: