To Make an Art Magazine That Doesn’t Go Broke There are Two Things You Need and Two Things You Don’t
The two things you need are a good editor and a good salesperson. A good editor can find and rally good writers and make an awesome magazine. A person who’s good at sales can twist people’s arms and make them support you.
Two things you don’t need is to print on paper and pay rent. Half this blog crows about the advantages of the web and the deficits of print publishing. That I feel very strongly about. Free content, ra ra ra.
Not having an office space… not so much.
It’s doable, but not always easy. I’m going to do a post about having 40 people all working remotely and how we adapt, but there is miscommunication, a lack of bonding, an inability to have someplace quiet where they don’t hand you a bill and expect you to leave after a while. And yes, coffee shops have free wifi, but never FAST Wifi. (Why doesn’t someone put that on the door – with FAST WiFi!)
But we manage, and it takes several thousand dollars off our monthly budget. There are also interesting issues of avoiding discriminatory practices. Not only do we not know the ethnic background of people who work for us, we don’t always know their gender. So for a long time, we used gender-neutral language that sounded like transgender demarcations from the 80′s when talking about MK Meador.
We just didn’t know.
So I’m going to write posts about how we do it over here. How 40 writers are managed without any kind of space. Those will be tagged, “office”.
