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    How to Launch a Magazine for Professional Publishers: Business for Breakfast, #8
    How to Launch a Magazine for Professional Publishers: Business for Breakfast, #8
    How to Launch a Magazine for Professional Publishers: Business for Breakfast, #8
    Ebook94 pages49 minutes

    How to Launch a Magazine for Professional Publishers: Business for Breakfast, #8

    By Blaze Ward

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    About this ebook

    Have you always wanted to create your own magazine? You can. The world has changed and the tools are now available.

    See how a team of plucky independent writers came up with and launched Boundary Shock Quarterly, a speculative fiction quarterly that looks as professional as anything coming out of New York. Don't lose your shirt, your marriage, or your mind in the process.

    "How to Launch a Magazine for Professional Publishers" expertly guides indie writers and publishers looking to move beyond just publishing their own work to stepping up to a more advanced game.

    Includes:

    Sample pitch document to recruit your authors

    Contract language for Syndicate members

    Tips and tricks for editing to get the most emotional impact

    The tools of the future and how they have leveled the playing field

    Letting someone else handle the money

    The Business for Breakfast series contains bite-sized business advice. This is a 301 level book, with advanced advice for the professional.

    Be sure to read all the books in this series!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKnotted Road Press
    Release dateAug 10, 2018
    ISBN9781943663835
    How to Launch a Magazine for Professional Publishers: Business for Breakfast, #8
    Author

    Blaze Ward

    Blaze Ward writes science fiction in the Alexandria Station universe (Jessica Keller, The Science Officer,  The Story Road, etc.) as well as several other science fiction universes, such as Star Dragon, the Dominion, and more. He also writes odd bits of high fantasy with swords and orcs. In addition, he is the Editor and Publisher of Boundary Shock Quarterly Magazine. You can find out more at his website www.blazeward.com, as well as Facebook, Goodreads, and other places. Blaze's works are available as ebooks, paper, and audio, and can be found at a variety of online vendors. His newsletter comes out regularly, and you can also follow his blog on his website. He really enjoys interacting with fans, and looks forward to any and all questions—even ones about his books!

    Read more from Blaze Ward

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      Book preview

      How to Launch a Magazine for Professional Publishers - Blaze Ward

      1

      This is Boundary Shock Quarterly’s Story…

      The document you are holding is the culmination of my desire to create my own quarterly speculative fiction magazine, at the point where the seventh revolution in Indie Publishing suddenly put the necessary tools in my hands. I don’t have to rely on kickstarting, or a major publishing house, or a lot of debt.

      Over the last year, I was able to put together a document of intent, recruit a Syndicate of writers to contribute stories, and eventually start publishing the magazine. The costs are remarkably low, if you work at it, and are willing to invest in the few necessary, time-saving tools that I will talk about deeper in this book.

      So what did I do?

      Quarterly

      Speculative Fiction (science fiction with a more intellectual intent, which is not the same as execution)

      Indie

      Magazine

      This Business For Breakfast book: How to Launch a Magazine for Professional Publishers is intended to guide you through the process I followed to get there, with the expectation that many of you will choose to follow in my footsteps and create your own magazines in the future. The tools are only going to get easier, over time, so you can do it.

      What you need is will and organization. An investment in some of the tools I will talk about, which will pay off quickly in time saved.

      And desire.

      So let’s get started.

      2

      Bundle Rabbit & Collaboration: A Background

      Bundles

      One of the more interesting tools for writers these days is what we call Bundles. There are several companies that do bundles, but there are interesting rules you need to be aware of.

      First, most bundles run on the artificial scarcity model. What that means is that the bundle is usually only available for a very limited time. Three weeks is a normal run, and then the bundle will be gone forever. This plays on your need to get it immediately.

      The second frequent characteristic of bundles is tiers. For something like $10 US, you get these five novels, but if you increase your contribution to $20US, you can get the whole set (normally 10 novels or novel-length titles and collections).

      Frequently, bundles are also limited to novels (or novel-sized collections), and are limited to ten books. Useful, but rigid and unforgiving, especially if you write a number of novellas, like I do.

      Another thing to take into account is that the folks invited to be in bundles tend to already be big names (or at least big enough) or they have to know somebody. As of the beginning of 2018, as I write this, so-called Traditional Publishing (the New York folks) have been ending their relationships with many authors for a while, and it has reached the point where former major best-selling authors are being offered greatly reduced contracts, if they can get a contract at all. Frequently, they are getting the rights back to their own books and are starting to publish them in the indie space.

      For a new writer trying to break out and get some coverage, it can be nearly impossible to get into a major bundle unless you know someone, or have written the perfect novel for a very weird theme. (Or have a reputation that you could be asked to step in and write something on an impossible deadline and make it. Did that, once.)

      So while bundles are a good deal for the folks who can get into them, the major players are not accessible to the rest of us. That’s where Bundle Rabbit comes in.

      Bundle Rabbit

      The Bundle Rabbit project (www.bundlerabbit.com) was something that a friend of mine who is a software developer put together. He wanted to create a tool for Indie writers to build their own bundles (the Do-It-Yourself model). Many new authors don’t have the tools to market themselves widely and gain exposure, especially not if they are writing shorter fiction than novels.

      In a bundle, a curator comes up with a concept, then builds a project by locating stories in the marketplace that fit their theme or by reaching out to people and asking if they have something that fits. They can include stories of any length, from flash fiction all the way up to novels, and any combination therein. This works in favor of newer authors, who tend to work on short fiction to hone their craft, before going out and trying to write an epic fantasy series in ten books.

      Also breaking the bundle model above, bundles can run forever, if everyone agrees. I’ve had bundles still making sales a year later, because I had a new fan, or someone else had a new fan, who grabbed the bundle when they discovered one of us.

      The work of marketing a bundle falls onto the authors themselves, rather than the bundling website, but it gives each author in the bundle the chance to reach all the fans of all the other writers who participate. This is a collective marketing gig, as much as anything.

      Generally, you aren’t going to get rich on any one bundle. That’s not the point of doing this. You are getting exposure, because people wanting to read on a theme might find you. Or if the bundle is new work, then fans of each of the writers will want to buy it and maybe read the rest of the stories. In terms of unit sales, Bundle Rabbit is currently my number two distributor. In terms of money, it is much closer to the bottom. But this is about exposure.

      And Discoverability for the new writer trying to reach readers.

      The technical side, the so-called secret sauce, is that Bundle Rabbit (Kydala Press) handles the effort to push the bundle

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