So You Want to Start A Zine Pt. 8

Time Management

Inspired by a recent post where I want some clarification from a new market, I want to talk to you a little about time management. Not necessarily breaking down how to spend your time, but hopefully talking about how to determine how long it will take to do tasks, how to determine how often you'll publish, and talking a little bit about what sorts of things you'll probably need to be working on at the same time.

First, how long do things take to do? Meaning, how long does it take to edit a story, lay out a zine, blah blah blah. These things are different from person to person from zine to zine. It takes me about a week to edit an issue if I can carve out time to dedicate to it. That's a couple hours a day. Really, the length of time it takes me to read the issue.

Let's say the issue is 48,000 words (which is about average, but that number includes spacing for advertising, table of contents, etc., but that ALL needs to be edited) takes me about 12 hours to edit. That's roughly 66 words a minute, which is pretty slow. But I'm editing, not reading.

Sometimes, however, there are stories that require more work. There are stories that can take 12 hours to edit on their own. Plus you have to factor in the time it takes to send the edits out to people (because EVERY story needs editing) and the time to receive edits back from the writers. I figure about a month for the whole process. It usually never takes that long, but that way I'm not behind should something take longer.

Occasionally, when a story is really strong but needs a fair amount of editing, I'll edit it ahead of being placed in an issue. I don't do this real often, but if it's a complicated story, and I'm going to be making complicated edits, there needs to be enough time for both the writer and me to work on the piece. I'm editing a long, complicated story right now that isn't currently placed in an issue. But it's not fair to either me or the author to try to get it done in the month I normally allocate for editing an issue. This way, too, there can be a little back and forth as the author can refute my changes and give explanation why something was written a certain way. But we'll talk more about editing in another post. Here, we just want to say give yourself enough time to edit the piece, and then double it.

Yeah, double it. You'll almost never run out of time. Right now it's January. The next issue comes out at the end of May. I'm going to put serious effort into editing starting next week. That means I should be done with the editing process by the end of February. Which gives me almost three months to finalize the lay out, get the cover, get ads, proofread the issue, create the new web content, contact reviewers, etc. and not drive myself crazy.

Once you know how long it takes to create one issue, then you can determine how many issues you can put out over the course of a year. I decided on biannual since I knew that six months was plenty of time to make an issue. This year, after six years of publishing and 13 issues, I'm moving to three issues. Part of my problem is that I'm getting very far ahead of what I'm accepting versus what I'm publishing. Meaning that if I stayed at two issues a year, I would be telling people, I'd like to accept your story, but I won't be able to publish it for four years. That doesn't work. And to put it nicely, that isn't fair. I don't pay enough to hold stories hostage for that long.

You would better serve yourself to set up several issues before you announce the zine. That way, you can have the lion's share of the work done before the first issue and get stuff out on a schedule. And be generous to yourself. We'd all like to be monthly or weekly, but you can always increase the number of times you publish during a year and not hurt your good stead in writer's and reader's eyes. However, decrease your publishing schedule and you may find yourself in danger of losing readers and writers.

For new print publications I would never attempt to be more than quarterly to start. Unless you have financial backing and a decent-sized staff...but then why would you be reading this? For a webzine, I would say monthly would be the fastest to go, and don't give a lot of content initially. Meaning, don't plan on publishing the equivalent of a print magazine every month. It takes no less time and effort to put together an electronic magazine versus a print one.

And it is IMPERATIVE that once you give a schedule that you stay on it. People will take you seriously when you say quarterly. They will subscribe and expect four issues over the course of one year. They will be disappointed at best and more than likely angry if that doesn't happen. And writers will not be happy to think that their story will come in issue #4 a year from now, only to learn it's really a year-and-a-half. Don't announce/commit to something you THINK you can do; announce/commit to something you KNOW you can do.

Here's something to consider; this is a rough schedule of what you should be doing month to month if you are going to publish quarterly*:

JAN: Print Feb issue / Select stories for May issue / solicit ads for May issue
FEB: Publish Feb issue / Select stories for May issue / solicit art for May issue
MAR: Edit/layout May issue / Select stories for Aug issue / proofread May issue
APR: Print May issue / Select stories for Aug issue / solicit ads Aug issue
MAY: Publish May issue / Select stories for Aug issue / solicit art Aug issue
JUN: Edit/layout Aug issue / Select stories for Nov issue / proofread Aug issue
JUL: Print Aug issue / Select stories for Nov issue / solicit ads Nov issue
AUG: Publish Aug issue / Select stories for Nov issue / solicit art Nov issue
SEP: Edit/layout Nov issue / Select stories for Feb issue / proofread Nov issue
OCT: Print Nov issue / Select stories for Feb issue / solicit ads Feb issue
NOV: Publish Nov issue / Select stories for Feb issue / solicit art Feb issue
DEC: Edit/layout Feb issue / Select stories for May issue / proofread Feb issue

I don't know about you, but that looks pretty busy to me. And heck, replace print with FTP and that could be the schedule for a quarterly webzine that puts out ~50,000 words of new content with every issue. If you add more issues (let's say monthly), then you could be looking at (I'll do one month for brevity's sake):

JUNE: Print July issue / Proofread Aug issue / Layout September issue / Edit October issue / Solicit artwork for November issue / Solicit advertising for December issue / Select stories for January issue...

Are you ready for that? Are you prepared to be doing all that at the same time? Because that's what monthly means. Maybe you won't have artwork or advertising to worry about and that would help. And maybe you're not going to do 50,000 words of new material every month, maybe you're looking at 15,000 words. That'll help a lot. But you still need to be thinking about future issues while you're putting out the current one.

The big things to take away from this part of the zine series? Determine how long it takes for you to put together one issue. Create a publishing schedule from that amount of time. Stick to the publishing schedule. Work on more than one issue at a time.

It does get easier. As with anything, the more you work at it, the more experience you accumulate, the better you get at it. That's when you can consider increasing your publication schedule.

And don't forget, I haven't factored in things like having a day job, a family, interests (like movies, music, travel), etc. This is just the time you'll need to commit to making a zine.

Are you ready?

* A little side note, since I suspect I'm mostly speaking to a genre crowd, you could use conventions that occur during publication months as a place to debut the issue. For example: Feb = Boskone; May = Wiscon; Aug = Worldcon; Nov = World Fantasy. It's always nice to have something new to show people at a convention. And remember, you can NEVER bring enough copies of the new issue.