Content Management
I'll admit it, this is where I get a little nutty. But it's how I do things, it's what I learned about this phase of the process from working in the pros. It's adaptable to this level, and I think vital for making a well-made zine.
We're talking about keeping track of what you're going to publish in a specific issue and how you're going to lay out that issue. A future post will speak to layout software and design. In this installment, we're getting into the nitty gritty.
As I select stories for an issue, I enter them into a spreadsheet. It looks like this:
This is pretty straightforward. You have the name of the author, the title of the piece, the word count (WC), the page count (PC; in my case, the word count/800), the format, E = edited or not, B = received bio or not, L = laid out or not, C = signed contract received or not, US? = whether the author lives in the US or not (could lead to interesting ways to pay), and $ = how much they're getting paid (blurred out, but the math is fairly simple since I pay one cent a word). The word count and page count columns are totaled so that I can keep track of how full the issue is getting.
Now, as is typical, this one is written on. In a moment you'll see phase two of my content management system. I was trying to figure out why I had 60 pages of content in InDesign, but still had items on this spreadsheet unaccounted for. Or so I thought. When I finally went through the PDF printout of the issue, I found that I had one full-page ad in twice, which give me the space I needed. The two highlighted pieces were the ones I was having trouble getting to fit. I wanted to give the new "Sampling the Aspic" feature three pages instead of two, and I didn't think I had it. And the KJ Bishop poem really is about a page-and-a-half. It's not an exact science.
I typically fill this out using Word's word count feature. This is not an account word count. Yes, it does count up how many words you have in your document, but as for how this translates into layout, the Word word count is extremely fallible. When doing layout, a word is six characters. This is why editors want you to use a mono-space typeface like Courier; every character in Courier is the same width. So, the letter 'm' and a '.' take up the same amount of space. You can count the number of characters in a line, get an average for the page, divide by six, and get the number of words per line. Whereas, a typeface like Times New Roman has characters that are different widths so the number of characters on a line are inconsistent from line to line in the story.
Why is this important? It's how you determine how many pages you need for a story, or a book, or whatever. As I said above, you get the average of the number of characters in a line. Let's call it 66 characters as the average number of characters in a line of text in your story. This means 11 words per line. (66/6 = 11) Then you count up the number of lines on a page, we'll say 25, and multiply the two together for 275 words/page. Then you figure out how many pages your story is by flipping through the pages and counting. We'll say ten-and-a-half pages for 2887.5 words, or 2900 words. Then divide by the number of words you get per page in the final layout, we'll use 800, and you get 3.625, or 3.75 pages needed in the magazine for your story.
Again, why is this important? Well, the process above counts a blank line as 11 words. It also counts a line with one word on it as 11 words. Why? Because that line will take up 11 words of space whether it's blank, had one word on it, or eleven words on it. You have to account for it as a FILLED line of text, even if it's blank. The story used in the example above could have 2500 words in it by Word's count. This would leave a half-page short when you went to lay it out. What if word counts this as 2000 words? (you have a lot of 'm's in it) That would leave you more than a page short of the space you needed.
But I use Word's word count function. Because for my purposes I only want a rough idea of how many pages. I usually take what Word tells me, and round it to something divisble by 400 (a half page in Electric Velocipede). For the most part this gives me the space I need. It's sloppy. And I get burned a lot when I go to lay out the issue.
So here's what I do before I fire up InDesign and start flowing documents in. This is the most important thing I learned from Asimov's while I worked there. I use this document to do a mock-up of the issue so I can visualize how things will flow from one story to the next. If I calculate the word count wrong, this document could be all screwed up. Here's the document:
Now, this one looks nice bcause I re-did it after I figured out what I had done wrong the first time. There are links below to PDFs of pages with 60 boxes, 70 boxes, 84 boxes, and 112 boxes. Here's how you use this sheet:
- Put the date and issue # in the upper right-hand corner of the page
- Cross out the first box. Your zine will never start with the left-hand page. That's the inside of the cover.
- Then you number your pages along the bottom, putting the number in the outer corner just like you'll do when you lay out the issue using software.
- Cross out the right-hand box after your last page. This way you don't accidentally go beyond the pages you've committed.
- (Asimov's always put the cover in their layout pages, but since I don't run any content on the inside or back of the cover, I just skip them.)
- I place 'ToC' in the first box for my table of contents, and 'contrib' in the last two open boxes for the contributor information; this way I don't skip them by accident.
- Then, start putting the stories/poems into the issue.
Now you have to make some decisions. Which story will be the lead off? Since this issue is going to be 60 pages, I mark the page 30 box so that I can start a story in the middle of the magazine, rather than having an ad, or the middle of a story. (zines tend to fall open to their middles, I try to make them pretty) What's the last story going to be? And then there's the whole issue of flowing one story to the next.
This is both simple and complicated. It requires you to think. I usually pick the placement of the lead-off story, the closing story, and the middle-of-the-issue story first. You could say that these are what I perceive as the three strongest stories in the issue, but that's not always the case. Sometimes your spacing of stories and all the other stuff going in the issue causes a strong story to be placed somewhere other than the first, middle, or last spot. Suffice to say, the stories I acquire are of such equally stellar quality that there's no stronger piece.
You can see here two examples of my initial lay out for this issue. They're not too different (other than getting cute with color) from the final version, but some things had to move around:
Interestingly enough, both of those were done on the same day. OK, maybe interesting to only me. Part of this exercise is to prevent two really long stories to be back to back, or a bunch of short pieces to follow each other. It can also help keep similarly themed stories away from each other so that the reader gives each an equal reading. Since I have such a mix of styles, I'd hate to put two robot stories on top of each other. Mostly I try to keep similar lengths apart and give reading the zine cover to cover a nice flow. But often I have to go into the style, tone, content of the story to determine the order they'll be in.
I do this for every issue. I even keep a version of the spreadsheet of stories I've accepted but not placed yet, and then I can just cut and paste the information from one spreadsheet to the next.
If you're interested, here are blank templates of the documents used above:
Contributor list: Excel Spreadsheet
The Open Office link isn't working, I'll fix it soon
60 page layout
70 page layout
84 page layout
112 page layout
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