DargonZine
Volume 12, Number 2 |
Distributed: 2/28/1999
Circulation: 686 |
 |
DargonZine is the publication vehicle of the
Dargon Project, a collaborative group of aspiring fantasy writers on the
Internet. We welcome new readers and writers interested in joining the
project. Please address all correspondance to
<dargon@shore.net>
or visit us on the World Wide Web at http://www.dargonzine.org/. Back
issues are available from
ftp.shore.net
in members/dargon/. Issues and public discussion are posted to newsgroup
rec.mag.dargon.
DargonZine 12-2, ISSN 1080-9910, (C) Copyright February, 1999
by the Dargon Project. Editor: Ornoth D.A. Liscomb
<ornoth@shore.net>,
Assistant Editor: Jon Evans
<godling@mnsinc.com>.
All rights reserved. All rights are reassigned to the individual
contributors. Stories and artwork appearing herein may not be reproduced
or redistributed without the explicit permission of their creators, except
in the case of freely reproducing entire issues for further distribution.
Reproduction of issues or any portions thereof for profit is forbidden.
|
Editorial
One of the most important lessons I've learned from 16 years on the
Internet is the importance of reaching out to new members of whatever
community you belong to.
This was best illustrated for me back when I was one of "the
regulars" on a particular Usenet newsgroup. Back then, I knew a woman
who had been around for years and was very popular with others who had
been around a long time. However, her attitude toward new members was
usually arrogant and condescending. Meanwhile, another woman I knew, who
had only been around for a short time, was more outgoing and welcoming
to new people.
Now, newsgroups are like most online communities in that there is a
constant flow of new people checking them out and old members leaving or
losing access. Over time, the arrogant woman's friends gradually moved
on to other things until there was no one left who remembered her, and
she spent all her time online grousing about how vital she was to the
popularity of the group and how no one seemed to appreciate that
anymore. Meanwhile, the newer, more outgoing woman had become the center
of a large circle of new members that made up the bulk of the community.
Understanding this -- that in a dynamic community, in order to
remain popular you need to actively welcome new members, and that the
price of arrogance and condescension toward "newbies" is obscurity --
was a major revelation for me. And it remains one of the most important
lessons that I try to infuse in DargonZine.
Every month, approximately five percent of our readership leaves,
and is replaced by new readers. Think about what that means for a
magazine where we're building on fifteen years of stories, and where any
given story may well rely on an understanding of names and places and
events depicted months earlier, or where any issue could contain "part
four" of a storyline. It means we need to do a superlative job at
reaching out and immediately engaging our new readers, and getting them
up to speed on what they need to know in order to understand and enjoy
our writing, and do that constantly.
That's an enormous struggle, but one where we've made some progress
in recent years. The Web site now includes a whole section called "About
Dargon" that includes such features as maps of the area, a special "New
Readers' Introduction" page, and our Online Glossary, which contains
encyclopedic definitions of every person, place, and thing we write
about. And each time something in our Glossary appears in a story on our
Web site, it is hyperlinked to its description in the Online Glossary.
And when we print "part four" of a storyline, we write that chapter so
that it can stand alone, and include pointers to the previous chapters.
Another way to establish familiarity with the milieu is to ensure
that there's some overlap between stories, so that readers become
comfortable with the people, places, and things that are most important.
Here, I must admit that we've done a mediocre job, which I'll talk a
little more about in a moment. But to address this problem we have
recently revived our practice of using contests and organized writing
exercises that incorporate communal events or themes, such as our 1997
Night of Souls stories, and our more recent comet stories. Look for more
of these in the future!
We realize that making it easy for new readers to get up to speed
is our biggest hurdle to overcome if we are to survive and grow. While
we've made some progress, I'm sure there's more we could do. If you have
specific ideas on this topic, we'd love to hear them, because it will
allow us to better serve you, and the readers whom we hope will follow.
Of course, new readers aren't the only people we need to reach out
to. Similarly, we need to integrate new writers and both make them feel
welcome and give them sufficient understanding of what we do and how we
do it so that they can immediately start producing printable fiction.
This is usually where the "commonality" I mentioned above breaks
down. Usually, new writers are uncomfortable writing stories that take
place within the unfamiliar confines of Dargon proper, so they strike
off on their own, writing a storyline that takes place on the outskirts
of known territory. By doing so, they avoid having to do much research
into what's already been written, and their stories are less
constrained. On the other hand, their works may never integrate into or
even overlap with the mainstream of Dargon work, and if this happens
often the project may become nothing more than a shell surrounding a
number of independent, unrelated storylines.
We've tried to address this in a number of ways, including rules
that require new writers to write their first story in Dargon proper,
the contests and communal events I spoke of above, and our new mentoring
system, which so far is showing great promise but limited capacity. So
far, we're doing a good job making writers feel welcome and productive,
but we still need to work on developing more commonality between
storylines.
But through all these struggles, the unwavering goal is to make it
easier for people, both readers and writers, to enjoy DargonZine, so
that it can grow and continue to contribute to the value of the
Internet, as it has done since 1984.
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