DargonZine
Volume 12, Number 3 |
Distributed: 3/27/1999
Circulation: 700 |
 |
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 12-3, ISSN 1080-9910, (C) Copyright March, 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
For those of you who haven't checked our Web site's
"What's New"
page recently, DargonZine was recently reviewed by Todd Kuipers'
"Open Road"
newsletter. I mention this not to promote ourselves, but because
his review contained a point I'd like to address. Todd wrote: "The
organization and consistent level of publication (sic) needed to drive a
publication like this is amazing, especially given that it is, I assume,
volunteer based."
To address the question, DargonZine is in fact completely volunteer
based. Our writers receive no financial reward for contributing their
works, nor do any of the production staff receive any payment for their
time and effort. We have never charged our readers any fees, nor do we
have any plans to do so in the future.
With that as a premise, a commercial-minded person might ask how
and why we do what we do. The 'why' is easy: we love doing it. We are
passionate about writing. The question of 'how' is a little more
difficult.
At the present time, producing and distributing DargonZine costs a
couple thousand dollars each year. That money goes primarily toward the
fees incurred in maintaining our Web site. Until recently, I paid these
fees out of my own pocket, because DargonZine is very important to me; I
consider it my life's work.
However, about a year ago our writers decided that they wanted to
help bear some of the financial burden for running the zine, and have
since begun contributing funds to offset our production costs.
DargonZine is, after all, vanity publishing, and as Alan Lauderdale once
put it, our writers thought it wrong to expect me to underwrite their
vanity!
There are, of course, other ways of bringing in money. However,
because DargonZine was founded in the early days of the Internet, we
retain some of the old values which characterized life in those pioneer
times. One of the strongest themes of the early Internet was that it was
aggressively noncommercial, and its evolution into an exclusively
commercial venue is both outrageous and insulting to those of us who
freely volunteered our time, skills, and labor to grow the Internet from
its prosaic beginnings.
While many sites these days squeeze pennies out of flashing banner
ads and link exchanges, DargonZine has remained firmly noncommercial and
avoided self-promotion. We do not accept advertising of any sort, nor do
we participate in banner ad exchanges. We do not place ads, and our
promotional efforts have been limited to occasional brief posts to
relevant forums. We do not spam newsgroups or send unsolicited email to
anyone. We will not exchange hyperlinks with other sites; in fact, we
are questioning the value of our "Links" page, and may delete it
altogether. And as Mr. Kupiers discovered, we will make little or no
mention of awards we receive, because we consider it shameless
self-promotion, and most Web awards are merely ways for the award sites
to self-servingly generate more traffic for themselves. We do not share
our distribution list with anyone, and have a published Privacy Policy
that we live by. Like I said, we're firmly noncommercial.
However, the strength of this conviction has the potential to
become our undoing. When DargonZine was founded, there was very little
interesting content to be found anywhere on the Internet, and it wasn't
difficult for readers to find us. Today the Internet is the world's
biggest entertainment venue, and the currency of the Internet is
people's attention. Not only are we competing with hundreds of other
fantasy fiction Webzines, but we are also competing for your attention
with online versions of traditional magazines like the New Yorker,
online broadcasts of professional sports like the NBA, online gaming
from Yahoo Games to Quake, online pornography, and every other site on
the planet that wants to capture your attention and turn it into a
profit.
DargonZine isn't after a profit, but we do need readers to survive.
Part of our mission as aspiring writers is to write for a broad,
representative audience and receive feedback from our readers. But
because of the increased competition for your attention, there is no
question that unless we begin to more aggressively promote ourselves,
our readership will dwindle and fall off. For that reason, we are
looking into things like purchasing advertising space, putting out press
releases, and so forth.
However, we will pursue this course without participating in
commercial ventures, charging fees, or displaying banner ads on our
site. You can rest assured that DargonZine will always remain a
volunteer-based organization that is wholly noncommercial and will never
be motivated by profit. Our goal is to get the word out about the great
things we have accomplished and build our readership, while remaining a
self-supporting organization that publishes great fiction not because it
brings us profit, but because we enjoy writing and publishing great
fiction and making an unselfconscious contribution to the richness of
the Internet.
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