SFReader Forums

SFReader.com : Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Book Reviews & more

SFWatcher.com : Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Movie Review

Project Wonderful - Your ad here, right now, for as low as $0.00

SFReader Forums > SFReader > Anything Goes! > Ezines

Forum Quick Jump

[ << Previous Thread | Next Thread >> | Show Newest Post First ]

Paul
Avid Reviewer

Date Joined Sep 2005
Total Posts : 177

Posted 1/23/2006 10:52 AM (GMT -4)

Hey everyone!

I'm just curious about zines. How much work goes into creating one? What kind of tools are needed to do one justice? Deep Magic is pretty impressive and seems to operate mainly out of Adobe Acrobat. Could one make a decent-looking ezine with Photoshop and Quark?

Just gathering some information now, but it is something I'd like to try one day. Any comments? Thoughts? Warnings? Free sandwiches?

Blog - http://wistfulwritings.blogspot.com/

Upcoming stories: "The Dealer's Hands" in Shimmer's Spring 2006 issue

Dragon Angel
Lord Dragon

Date Joined Sep 2004
Total Posts : 1066

Posted 1/23/2006 11:18 AM (GMT -4)

There are some webpages out there that give advice on how to start up your own ezine. A google search should turn some up pretty quick.

read free fiction and poetry at http://www.geocities.com/davidolson22/index.html

EdMcfadden
Neophyte

Date Joined Sep 2004
Total Posts : 103

Posted 1/23/2006 11:25 AM (GMT -4)

Paul: It's just like a regular magazine...it all depends on how much time and money your willing to invest. Up side: Low risk. Down Side: There are a zillion of them.

Shane
EIC EpicSFF

Date Joined Nov 2005
Total Posts : 29

Posted 2/7/2006 4:57 PM (GMT -4)

The first thing you need to know is that there definitely are a ton of them! That means that you will have to complete with all of them for readership. So you have to think about how you are going to do that. What is the special thing you going to offer?

For a zine that publishes stories, you need to find people who are going to submit QUALITY stories. If you are managing the site yourself, you are probably not going to have the time it takes to edit to death manuscripts for publication, so you will NEED help.

As to the format of publication... Adobe is fun,...cool,...can look professional. The problem is that people need to download these from your website. They are large, slow to download, and slow to display, unlike work published in a webpage. You can download OPEN OFFICE at openoffice.org to help. This suite will let you Save As PDF,...so making them is not a problem.

You also have to think about how you are going to display your content. Sites like Deep Magic do look great, but it may cost an arm an a leg to pay a professional designer to do that for you, and if you don’t like it at some point, you’ll have to change it…another leg. If content is what is important for you, you can go as a minimalist (EpicSFF). You will need to know a little about web design, mainly CSS.

Don’t forget about distribution. Will you distribute your zine, or will you require people to come to your site to view it? If you want to distribute it, then you have to find a service or web program (mailing list) that won’t send your newsletters to your readers’ trash bins.

About art. Where are you going to get it? Beware of displaying copyrighted material on your site or banners!

Oh, you’ll need to figure out how your contracts will be termed. Even for a free zine, you need some sort of contract on the work you display.

Yup. And if you don’t think you will have the heart to keep it up for years, forget it.

-Shane

http://www.epicsff.com Non-Fiction Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mythology, and Horror

Daniel
Carl Jung's Waterboy

Date Joined Aug 2003
Total Posts : 4515

Posted 2/8/2006 7:56 PM (GMT -4)

Maintaining any website is usally a lot more work than one imagines.... On the other hand, as Ed mentioned, there's normally less of a financial risk with e-publishing than with print.

You'll also have to read through a lot of submissions, even if your pay-rate is low, or nonexistent. You'll probably get more subs than you'd expect and reading and responding to subs can take up quite a bit of time.

Get someone who is knowledgeable about web-promotion to assist you if you can -- you might post excellent material -- but websites need promotion just like any other product to help recruit an audience.

Good luck!!!

Daniel

www.pitchblackbooks.com

Forum Information

Currently it is Friday, September 05, 2008 11:32 PM (GMT -4)
There are a total of 80,541 posts in 6,390 threads.
In the last 3 days there were 19 new threads and 113 reply posts. View Active Threads