Art Editor and Pimp?! (A ‘Day In The Life’ Post)
Originally published at Genre Splicing: Blog Entry. Please leave any comments there.
It’s the weekend and it’s nearly the middle of the month, so you can bet things are hopping at Crossed Genres HQ. As usual, I find myself juggling tasks. Today I get to work on my favorite task…and my least favorite one.
I really enjoy looking for cover artists. I would search Deviant Art and Livejournal and Google Images for days on end if I had the time. As it is, I give myself a fairly narrow window - one weekend, typically about six weeks in advance of the deadline - to decide which artists to invite and which to save for another time. I emailed an artist today who is probably too busy right now to work with us, but I tend to operate with the rule in mind that ‘it can’t hurt to try.’ I’ve been rewarded a few times already for taking that particular risk. As it turns out, artists seem to really like the concept behind Crossed Genres. I’m not surprised. (I have just as much fun searching for non-fiction contributors, by the way, but today I went hunting for artists.)
Unfortunately, keeping the magazine alive isn’t all about luring talented contributors. Talent doesn’t sell itself, after all. Advertising; it’s one of those necessary evils. It helps that so far all our content is free online. People like free. It also helps that we don’t charge much for the formats we sell-dead tree, PDF, Kindle, audio. People like a bargain. But the trick is in the outreach. Because I am the sort of person who loathes being advertised to indiscriminately, I always try to pimp Crossed Genres only in places it will be well received. (Yes, I’d rather call it ‘pimping’ than advertising; humor is my coping mechanism.) We like to reach people at SFF conventions, in online communities and writers’ groups, etc. I’ve even spread the word among my MMORPG friends, with their consent. Naturally, my favorite kind of advertising is the kind that other people do for me; word of mouth. It’s also the most effective way to promote any business, so please feel free to pimp CG to your friends and neighbors.
Every month is different, too. Every time we work with a new genre, I find that there are new places to look for artists and different places to pimp the magazine. This means that there is always opportunity for Crossed Genres to grow and reach new readers, but it also means that much of my work starts from scratch every month. I wouldn’t promote the release of our Humor issue in an exclusively Crime Fiction-oriented Livejournal community, for example, so each month I first have to locate the new best places to talk about CG. Then I have to compose one ad to draw new contributions in one genre for the next issue, and write another ad to attract genre-appropriate customers to the current issue. And then there are the gentle reminders that I send out during the month to some of the places I’ve pimped before to maintain the flow of return visitors to the website.
Fortunately, I don’t have to finish all of that in one day. Today I was focused. I emailed artists for biographical information, progress on cover art, and sent one invitation to do a future cover. Then I put out a call for submissions to the SFF-writing Livejournal demographic, and re-wrote the comprehensive ad that I use in places that don’t require such a light touch (craigslist, etc.). Next on my list are the Urban SFF writers, SFF Humor fans, and artists who are very good with Anthropomorphs. Good times.