News: Black Friday 2009
Monday, November 23, 2009
When was the last time you saw a small-press genre magazine that was in the black? They're a labor of love, but a lot more than love goes into them. Did you know we pay our contributors roughly $2000 an issue? And of course, we'd love to pay them more, even retroactively. That's part of GUD's "big business plan", working the long tail and all that. This Black Friday, you could help make that happen.
GUD Magazine is wrapping up our third year of publishing, and looking forward to many more. The global economic recession has put the squeeze on everyone, so things are more stressful than even most "start up magazines" go through, across the board.
We don't spend much, relatively, on advertising (review copies get sent out; we sporadically put ads in other magazines, or more often on other websites, but that might amount to $100/yr). We're not masters-of-advertising. If you've heard of us, to date, it's most likely that you found us on Duotrope or Ralan's Webstravaganza. We had a nice boost of name recognition via our "win a Kindle" contest via Twitter (but not sales); for the most part it's a slow, and hopefully ever-increasing word-of-mouth process.
That said, we're diving into this year's Black Friday with caution to the wind (it's tethered, mind you; a beautiful caution-kite dancing in the sky). We've done a bit of spreading it around already, but if you've missed it:
Pay what you want for GUD Magazine!
We've even made it easy to get all five issues at once for as little as a penny (though we, and thus our contributors) won't see a cent unless you pay more than five cents.
If you've gotten your copies (how could you not, for just a penny, at least?), have you told a friend? Have you started to dig in? There's a thousand pages of award-winning literary + genre fiction, poetry, art, and more; we know it's a lot to digest all at once. But has anything jumped out at you, made you want to share it with someone? Maybe come on into the forums and discuss your favorite bits of an issue.
So how's that going? We've been running this campaign for a week, now, and I can say it's going pretty damned well--it's even hit the low end of my "hopes", and I'm a pretty optimistic guy who's just been beaten down a few too many times by reality. We've sold eight times more copies this month (most of them in the last week) than any month prior. Of course, many of those copies have gone for practically nothing. But we've still grossed almost more than twice any previous month; and even more importantly, we've netted (if you take into account costs associated with an individual print copy) four times more than any previous month. We've just about doubled the circulation of our largest-circulating issue.
We're really getting close to owing some of our earliest contributors some more money over their advances. That's exciting.
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