Or, How To Build Your Own E-Zine
By Doug Lawson
Here's how it started: A couple of years back, before the launch
of HotWired, Salon, and yep, even before good old Tripod as we now know it,
I had this idea. Why not get a bunch of good writers together and make a
literary magazine?
Obviously, I wasn't the first person to come up with this idea.
Literary magazines have been around for a long time. I didn't have a lot of
money, though. Printing a magazine was out of the question. And who was
going to buy some little magazine they never heard of?
So I put my magazine online, for free, and the first issue of The Blue Penny
Quarterly was born. It was clunky, readable only on a Macintosh, and
for a long time it was available only on America Online. People looked at
me kind of strangely — bad enough I was putting out a literary magazine, and giving it away, at that. But an electronic magazine? Who was going to
read that? Only geeks were on the Internet, went the theory; they'd
probably only read geek things, if they read at all.
Nowadays, of course, geek has gone chic, and phenomenal numbers of people are reading
things online (Hey, you are). Blue Penny went on to become one of the first online magazines to carve out
a space for high-quality literary writing on the Internet, and as such it got some decent attention. It was well-reviewed in many computer and
writers' magazines, it won Web awards, it got our writers some good attention,
and it even got me a day-job creating and editing electronic and print
publications. (It even continues now, without me, under another
staff. Go figure.)
But I think BPQ originally did well for one simple reason: I really loved
what I was doing. I was on a mission to bring writing that mattered to
an online audience. Nothing was more important to me then putting that
thing together. I tracked down writers, sat down with them at the laptop,
showed them what their stories could look like online. I talked up the
possibilities of online publishing — Hey, you can actually correspond with people who read your
work! You can get read in New Zealand! In Antarctica! I spent long
nights at the laptop, figuring out what this HTML crap was, and what I
could do with it.
I'm still on that mission at The Blue Moon Review. Making an
online magazine now is a lot easier, though, in part because a lot of
people are doing it and in part because the technology is far more
flexible. If you can make a home page, you're only a few steps from making a magazine online. And now you no longer have to tell everyone how
to get to it, what software to use, and so forth — even car dealers have Web
pages these days.
Of course now, the challenge is to stand out from the crowd and
get noticed. But attention-getting gimmicks aside, in my mind, the small online magazines that are truly
successful, and worth reading, are still those put together by editors and
staffs who are addicted to their own subject matter.
Want to publish a good magazine online? Get addicted. Stay
addicted. Love your subject enough to breathe it, day in and day out, and
everything else will fall into place.
Now, I'm assuming you've made the leap, and have decided to set out and enlighten
the world on a topic you know best. So, how do you get started?
First of all, if you're not a writer or artist yourself, you might
want to dig up some writers and artists. Wear black and go to
coffeehouses, post notices around your local colleges or in your local
paper, or post on newsgroups (misc.writing seems to be a place where a lot
of people look for writers). Describe in detail what your ezine will be
about, and how it's different from other ezines you've seen, and talk
specifically about what sort of articles or artwork you'd like to receive.
The more specific you are, the less time you may have to spend sorting
through inappropriate material. Be clear about your payment terms, if any.
Once you've got some content, you'll want to decide on the
technology you'd like to use. There are several different formats that you can use to publish electronically; what you pick will depend on how proficient you
are with your computer, your target audience, and how widely
read you'd like your ezine to become.
Commonly, most ezines come to reside on the Web, or at least have a
Web site about themselves where you can subscribe or download issues. If
you've put together a homepage already, it's an easy step up to
make your homepage into your own magazine — just add more content.
You'll need to learn at least the basics of HTML, which shouldn't take you
too long, and you'll want either an HTML editing program (like BBEdit for Mac,
WebEdit Pro for Windows, or something similar) or a simple text editor to help with that.
If you want to include images, you'll need Adobe Photoshop or a similar
program to help you fiddle around with them. If
you don't yet have your own homepage (and why not??) you'll want to find a
place on a server connected to the Web to host you, too. There's free
space here on Tripod, of course, but if you want to go whole hog and get
your own domain name (so you could be on the Web at
"www.my-own-whole-hog-ezine.com"), you'll want to talk to your ISP (your service provider) for details.
But the Web isn't the only way to go. Some publishers feel
frustrated by the medium, anyway — sites look different on different
machines and browsers, and not everyone wants to code all night anymore.
Some people simply publish by e-mail; it's inexpensive, easy to do, easy to
distribute, and you won't have people sending you e-mail asking you how to
read it. (Since they'll have pretty much figured that out, before they could reach you, right?)
Webzines and e-mailed ezines often have the potential to reach a broader audience — they don't
require special software to be read.
Another option, though, is Adobe Acrobat, a publishing program that
creates PDF (for Portable Document Format) files — these can be read by any machine that has an Acrobat reader (which you can download for free).
These give you full control over what a "page" looks like; you'll lay out
the magazine with a desktop publishing program first, like PageMaker or
Quark. PDF files are generally downloaded from a Web site or an ftp
server.
Once you've decided on a format, (and hey, you can do all three, if you'd like)
it just comes down to the sweat of laying out the ezine, and uploading it
to your site. I recommend lots of coffee, snack foods, and a few of your
favorite CDs on random shuffle to get you through.
Now that you've put your ezine's
first issue together, what do you do?
That depends on what your own goals for your magazine are. Is it
a zine for your own writing, and your friends' art? You might be happy
just to let your friends know where to find it, and to have them tell
their friends (and so on, and so on...) If you're looking for a
larger audience, though, there are some specific ways to reach out and draw
in both readers and potential contributors.
If you've decided to publish on the Web, swapping links with
like-minded publications is a great way to start. Create a links page, and
then look for magazines with content and production values very much like
your own. Drop them some e-mail and see if they'd be interested in
exchanging links — most small magazines are looking to do the same thing, so
it shouldn't be a problem.
Then, set out to hit the newsgroups.
Alt.ezines is the place to start, of course — here you can
also swap notes, get advice, flame a few people (that seems to be what
most time is spent on here) and get a good sense of what's out there in
ezineland. To make an ezine, you should read ezines; it's the ezine
spiritual code. You might also find some new contributors here — so you should
post your guidelines while you're at it.
Look for, and post specifically to, newsgroups which directly
relate to your ezine's focus. No one likes a spammer. Spamming also
isn't terribly effective in this case — your aim is to seek out places online
where like-minded people hang, and start hanging there, too. This way
you'll attract people to your zine who'll come back again.
Banner exchanges are yet another good way to start things running.
While high-end online magazines sell these for various amounts of money,
for the small publisher these can be a great way to draw interest. The Link Exchange has a great system
set up — you display a banner of theirs in exchange for having a banner of
yours displayed at another site.
All this promotional stuff can sound like a chore. And it is a
chore, some days, one that can seem unrelated to what probably drew you
into putting together your ezine in the first place — the creative stuff,
the great writing, the art, the late nights at the computer working on your
own Thing, rather than somebody else's Thing.
But the promotion brings you an audience, and an audience brings
you great contributors. And for me, the exciting thing has always been being
able to publish great writing, and knowing that people from several
continents are reading what I and my writers have brought online.
I'll end here with links to a few of my favorite ezines; check
out these places to get you started on the possibilities! Then, drop me a
note when you're up and running--I'll be your first reader.
OTHER ONLINE LIT MAGS
Entelechy: by Flat Earth Media, founded by Triteca columnist Steven Horn. Fiction, poetry and columns.
Black Street, Yellow Moon: a bimonthly e-journal publishing poetry, short fiction,
visual art, and opinions.
eSCENE 1996: a yearly anthology of the best online-published short fiction.
Web del Sol, Locus of Literary Art: dedicated to bringing contemporary literary art to a wide audience.
Doug Lawson now edits The Blue Moon Review with the same
staff who used to put together Blue Penny. He's a contributing editor to
CrossConnect, a
Producer at Gameshows.Com, and his
collection of short fiction "Patrimony of Fishes" will appear this summer.
In his spare time he tries to figure out how to work the VCR.
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