New magazine

[coalescent]

scalpel_mag, for all your sf reviewing and criticism needs.
First issue includes:

• A guest editorial by Pat Cadigan


• A column by Adam Roberts


• An interview with Charles Stross


• Reviews of Ink by Hal Duncan, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate by Ted Chiang, and Gradisil by Adam Roberts.

If you want to contribute, guidelines are here.

Comments

[rosefox]

As much as it goes against the modern grain, I would honestly recommend having your readers pay for the content they read. Ad-supported publications generally do very poorly online, in my experience. By all means offer free content, but either solicit donations or put some of your content behind a paywall. I've yet to see anyone make it work any other way.

Another option, of course, is to start up a separate money-making venture and funnel the profits from it into support of Scalpel; then it's still out of pocket, but as your "pocket" has increased by $850 or however much, there's no net loss to you other than your time and effort. Running two startups at once is pretty hectic, though.

I certainly wish you the best with it. Roberts's column was terrific and I'd love to see more like it. I hope you can encourage your reviewers to really let loose, not be so shy with their I-statements and opinions (speaking as a reviewer, I am so tired of reading and writing reviews where the reader is referred to as "one" and the reviewer's voice is buried beneath equivocations), and have a good time telling people what they think. I'd be willing to take a bit of a pay cut for a venue that encouraged that sort of writing--or make a donation to it, or pay to read it--and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

[deadcities-icon.livejournal.com]

We've discussed various ways of generating cash, including using a combination of Amazon links, PayPal donations, ad revenue and whatever else we can throw in. The problem is that with so many streams, it's difficult to keep people interested enough to actually contribute. Another thing to deal with is that if we did such a thing, we'd want to keep our accounting transparent. Jonathan and me certainly aren't in it for the cash!

As for reviews... we're encouraging as best we can, and I hope that some of our own contributions will go some way toward illustrating more precisely what we're looking for. It comes down to those contributing reviewers, and how willing they are to dig in and produce the kind of stuff we want.

But in the end, we're still in the nebulous stage. After all, this mag went from concept to launch in... what? A few days over a month? So we'll evolve.