Why not a 32-page monthly?

[geoffrey]

Would it be more work and/or more expense to make Fight On! a 32ish-page monthly instead of a 100+ page quarterly?

While Fight On! is great as a quarterly, I'd like it even more if I could get a dose every month.

[coffee]

I think it's a matter of wear and tear on the editorial staff. I've done a monthly publication (it was a newsletter for a group, but I did it for two years and it felt like forever...) and know the kind of stresses it can cause.

That being said, however, I wouldn't object to a monthly schedule. It'd be even more like the original Dragon magazine.

[Melan]

A monthly schedule would be The Thing from Hell. I edit a publication series with an annual plan, and it is already a pain to do sometimes.

[crusssdaddy]

Let me know if the help of an extra Indian would make the difference in getting FO! to go monthly. Happy to take some of the burden off the Chiefs. I know how to spell and make English words go together... mostly.

And if you need help to stay on target quarterly, I'm happy to pitch in there too...

[calithena]

It seems to take me about 3.5 months to assemble an issue. I'm hoping that if we stay strong on the 88 pages I can get that down to 3 or 2.5, keeping a quarterly schedule going.

We have had some very good offers of help before (one professional layout guy in Canada even offered to do the whole issue layout!) and appreciate those being made here. The problem is one of process. Basically, stitching everything together, getting art, rewriting questionable prose, etc. is done page by page at the same time as layout. And Ig doesn't really know how to break this up. So getting extra proofreading, etc. would certainly be somewhat useful, but in order to figure out a way to develop the issue as a team would require some serious rethinking of how things are done.

Complicating things further is that my articles are often written to fill gaps in the issue, but I don't always know what the gaps are until layout has already started.

But I appreciate the offer and we can talk about how this might work out.

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One reason not to do 32 pages is cost. For lulu and to some degree anyone, small print run costs are high per-unit but go up in fairly small increments with extra pages. Would you rather pay $7.50 for 32 pages or $10 for 88+?

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We might be able to get up to bimonthly eventually, but no guarantees. One thing that has slowed us down some is the fiction contest - I had no idea how much work that was going to be. Soon that will be done though, so that will be a good time to re-evaluate things.

There is at least one more big contest we want to do but it's going to be a few months before we announce it, because Ig needs a slightly lighter workload for a bit.

[calithena]

Also, it's like this. When we 'start layout' we are working with a mix of actual submissions, promised submissions, blog posts that people have signaled a willingness to rewrite or let me rewrite, posts on these boards, old stuff me and my RL gaming buddies have lying around, and so forth. Then we have to go get art, rewrite stuff, etc. And so in a sense there is no real 'content' prior to layout - the content becomes usable content through the process of layout.

It's not like we're a magazine with submission guidelines that allow us to plug text seamlessly into a preexisting format, I guess is what I'm trying to say. We try to put stuff together in a way that makes it fun and interesting but the process starts out much more raw and organic than say working on my junior high school newspaper ever was.

[geoffrey]

Thanks for the replies, Sean.

To re-emphasize, I'm totally cool with a quarterly release schedule. ;D