Bookcase, copyright 2019 Douglas Stockdale
As readers of this photo-blog know I have self-published three artist books and two photo-technical books as well as founding the photo-book-blog The PhotoBook (most recently what become The PhotoBook Journal). Something that I have been considering for a long while is to convert the the photo-book-blog into a full blown magazine.
Recently I have been working with my Associate Editor to determine what and how we could improve the reader’s experience while we continue to investigate the published photographic (& artistic) narratives. The conclusion was moving us towards creating a magazine. My chief concern was about the amount of time this would require of me versus what it might take away from my own creative endeavors.
So I did the stuff a business guy was suppose to do for a potential new business; risk analysis, determine pros and cons, what might this business concept look like (Mission and vision statements), etc. I know that expanding this exciting venture was going to take more of my time, but I also know that I am greatly inspired by the artist and photographers and their books that I interact with. Final decision; oh well, I might just as well jump in and see if I stay float on this artistic pond! Everything I came up with really indicated that this was something I should do, thus forge on.
So a couple of days I took the first step and formed a publishing company that will be the backbone for the magazine. I also found a way to make this a bit painless by using a WordPress process pathway that maximizes most of past work and only required a few tweaks to make the transition. Done. Here is our formal magazine announcement for the PhotoBook Journal.
The good news is that I will continue to see cutting edge and exciting new books and have the opportunity to analyze their salient points when writing my book reviews. I just might be spending a bit more time taking the helm of this racing sloop. For the moment this magazine will be an on-line edition, pretty similar to what we have been doing, while we sort out if we want to publish it as a hard copy and if so, how often, etc. Okay, I will have to admit that’s pretty exciting too!
I just need to make sure that I carve out time to work on my own creative projects. And I won’t know how this will works out for a while; nevertheless the San Diego gallery submission that I was planning to do today is one I did not do. hmmmmm, I hope that does not become a trend. Instead I spent the better part of the day looking at and evaluating potential on-line magazine designs and templates for the new magazine. And I did find that to be both fun and extermely interesting; so it was just a different kind of creative excercise.
Cheers!
Singular Images 
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