Full Stop Mag on Launching a Website, Paying for Writing, and Not Going Bankrupt
At what point did you start to think, “Ok, this is working.” Have you hit that point?
Editorially and financially, things keep getting better and better. The site is running smoother than ever, and I think that the quality of the material that we’re publishing has never been higher. A year ago, I was extremely proud of what we’d accomplished, but I wouldn’t have been able to say that financial stability was on the horizon. The next step, now that we have the resources to take a few calculated risks, is to build on that: to use our resources to break into new avenues, while continually improving things both editorially and financially.
How do you get used to asking people to give you money?
We’ve never really had to before, but we’re working on a few projects now that will require grants, donations, or investors and are starting to have meetings with a few people in the coming weeks. That’s a strange thing to prepare for — to ask people to give money to a website run by people in their mid-20s who are predominantly interested in engaging literary criticism, bawdy humor, and wizards — but I feel pretty good about where we stand. We’ve also had a number of conversations over the past few weeks about who we would take money from and under what conditions, and from those conversations, I’m confident that wherever we go from here we’ll hold fast to the principles we started with.
Anything you’d wish you’d known going into it that would have made the process easier, financially or otherwise?
Not really, in part because I’ve gotten so much out of learning how to be a better writer and editor. That said, when I started those were the only two things I (and probably most of our other editors and writers) were interested in. But now I’m becoming more and more interested and involved in figuring out how to make this thing work financially. I wish I had known a little more about that aspect of managing a website when we started, as hopefully we’d be even closer to financial stability if I had. But when we started, we had no idea that the site would take off as much as it has. Then, it was all about putting ourselves out there and doing it, like Henry Rollins told us; now, we’re still doing it, but we’re finally in a position where we can figure out how to make this work —- not just for ourselves, but for everyone.
Follow Virginia K. Smith on Twitter @vksmith.