Be the Change

interviews

We may be interviewing an Italian electronic pop band very soon! I like them, and I know pretty much nothing about the Italian music scene, so it should be a pretty fun interview!

Babylonia - https://www.myspace.com/babylonia

For almost a year now, we've been trying to move our online 'zine into print, and it's been such a struggle! From trying to find advertisers and contacting bands to coming up with enough material and dealing with printers, it's been quite an ordeal.

We've made a decision to possibly forego a printer and print the darn thing ourselves. The printer I've been in contact with wants over $1,000 for a 24 page issue (for 500 copies). I'm not sure we can come up with that amount in advertising, and I'm not sure we need that many copies.

The tricky thing about magazines is that it takes a few months (sometimes years) before you start seeing any profit, and we have no money to back this up. It must be self-sustaining or we can't do it.

I'm tired of thinking, "There's only two of us! How can we do all of this? How can we manage a magazine, write all of the content and deal with advertising issues?"

It can be done! Admittedly, it's a lot of work, but it's worth it. This never really felt like "work," anyway.

So at the moment, we're looking into having it printed and copied at somewhere like Staples or Kinko's. We can print 30-50 preliminary copies and see how they sell (at a pretty low price, probably). We'd only need a handful of advertisers to pay for the copies.

We never wanted to be one of those magazines with a million ads. All those ads do is pay the salaries of the people who go out and find more ads. Kind of pointless to me...

So that's the direction we're thinking of going in right now, and I guess we'll see how it goes.