What is the Magazine Diaries?
A little book publishing project designed to let magazine people tell the world how they feel about making magazines in the middle of the biggest disruption in publishing history and raise some money for a great charity.
What charity?
MagAid, an offshoot of the National Literacy Trust, that’s using magazines to improve literacy among young people in disadvantaged areas of the UK.
Nice idea, how can I help?
First thing is to submit a diary entry – without your 100 words we won’t get very far. Then share the project with all your magazine making friends and encourage them to share their feelings.
Why 100 words?
We’re using the 100-word flash fiction format know as a drabble, designed to challenge writers to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space. This seemed like the perfect format for magazine professionals to express their feelings about their work – in direct contrast to the acres of strategic musings they read day in day out about the future of the magazine business.
Do I need to be working in magazines to contribute?
Ideally yes, because we want to the book to be about how magazine people feel today. But if you have something interesting or entertaining to say, we might overlook the fact that you do something else to pay the bills.
Does it matter where I am?
Not at all. We’ve focused initially on people from the UK magazine industry because the book will be sold to help out a UK charity, but we’ll publish great entries from anywhere in the world. Magazines are magazines, right?
What if you get more than 100 entries?
That’s the classic ‘nice problem to have’ scenario. All submissions will be published on the website (so long as they meet our exacting standards of taste and decency). If we get more than 100 entries submitted then our favourite 100 will make it into the book.
Whose idea is the Magazine Diaries?
Peter Houston of the Flipping Pages Blog, inspired by a friend who had a stroke last year and wrote and published ‘Snapshots of a Stroke Recovery‘ documenting his fight back to health, 100 words at a time.