Kyle Tress

We are now a few days past the deadline for the first edition of Sliding Magazine. In this post I want to update everyone on the progress of the magazine and the reasons for the delay. Firstly, the magazine is alive and will be available this month.. The content is written, photos are being organized, and the final bits of polishing are underway.

So why the delay? Truthfully, we could have launched by the original October 31st deadline, but the final product would have felt rushed and incomplete. There are two of us working full time on the project, plus input from a few dozen friends and volunteers — all of whom are currently sliding. Coordinating our schedules is tricky. Meanwhile I’m trying hard to keep my inner-perfectionist in check while still putting out a high-quality publication.

More importantly there is still the issue of printing. I was originally in favor of using a print on demand service like MagCloud, but the cost of production quickly rises to a price point I’m not entirely comfortable with. A 40-page magazine will cost $8.00, plus shipping and publisher markup. Alternatively, we can pay an upfront printing cost of about $3000 and produce approximately 1500 copies, allowing us to sell the magazine at a much lower rate. It’s not easy to raise that amount of money in such a short period of time. I’m looking at some crowd-sourcing options such as Kickstarter to help offset the cost for future editions. Ultimately until we can sell advertising space and collect concrete circulation numbers, we are playing a guessing game.

Thankfully it’s a fun guessing game, and I’m still confident that our community will enjoy and support Sliding Magazine. So please bear with me while we get this little experiment off the ground and running (or is it sliding?). It’s going to take some time to find our groove (ok, I’ll stop now), but I promise the final product will be worth it.