Well, since that seems to be me in the third person again, I guess I should reply.
My argument, Marcus, was with your assumption of The Drunken Boat as a
company along with the use of 'customer' and 'vendor' as synonyms for 'reader'
and 'contributor' respectively. Since a 'customer is one who purchases goods or
services,' and a 'vendor' is 'one who offers goods for sale,' it doesn't seem to me
to apply. We do have readers/visitors who read for free and contributors who
contribute for free. Though it should be noted that the contributions are the
result of much work, which is receiving no renumeration, which I remind myself
of when the hours of html begins to wear.
I don't have a stats page that keeps track of daily or yearly totals and don't
want to break out the calculator, but this last week there were 3942 unique
visitors to the site, so it's perhaps less than Masthead gets. Is The Drunken Boat,
or Masthead, constituting the "very rarified world of no-submissions poetry
journals"? To me, it's more significant that they are both magazines founded by
women editors, independent of any foundation or financial institution's support,
designed and webworked by each of us, and having created a poetry venue that
is of value to our respective contributors and readers, and the no-submissions
policy is the only manageable one.
Neither do I see anything wrong with publishing the work of friends if it's
interesting work, or requesting work from writers. I do have contributing
editors, which is not a screening collective (like for instance at Field where all of
the editors have to favor a particular work for it to be published), but which
works more on the principle of guest editing, as they bring in work or features
that I might not be familiar with or have access to, and do so, dependent on
their schedules and enthusiasms. And Alison may have a point that the best
magazines are those that reflect a particular editor's sensibility; I think highly of
Masthead and it is one of the best internet magazines.
Basically I publish The Drunken Boat because I like creating a space for poetry,
even those poetries that I may have no affinity for, nor am I interested in
competing with other magazines (hence, our always featuring other magazines
or publishers of poetry, including Masthead, Ravi Shankar's Drunken Boat, the
current features etc, to send our visitors to other sites) or with business models
for success. That biz aspect seems to me only depressing, somewhat back to
the beggar's banquet and fighting over crumbs.
best,
Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:54:42 -0500
>From: Marcus Bales <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Money and poetry
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>On 11 Jan 2006 at 10:22, Alison Croggon wrote:
>> OK Marcus - I'll bite - just as a matter of interest, what is the gap
>> in Masthead between what I say and what I do, that I have to be "held
>> to account" for?<
>
>I thought I had clearly exempted you from the issue, twice, by saying I
>thought your policy of non-submission eminently sensible and when I
>said "even though she herself doesn't indulge in it because she has a
>no-submissions policy." I deny that you have to be held to account for
>the things for which I criticized other editors, who do not adhere to your
>no-submissions policy.
>
>> I don't know how you can assert that the Drunken Boat has no readers:<
>
>That's easy: the editor said she had no customers and no vendors. That
>would mean "no readers" to nearly anyone, I'd imagine. Perhaps in the
>very rarified world of no-submissions poetry journals it means something
>else. If so, please tell me what it does mean.
>
>> as I recall, though I don't remember the usage stats, it has a very
>> large readership, larger than Masthead's. Last year's user stats for
>> Masthead averaged around 600 hits a day, about 205,000 for the
>> year/issue, which adds up to just over (46,961) 45,000 unique visitors
>> for 2005. The previous issues, on another site, were viewed 122,821
>> times. Fairly small beer for the internet, you might argue, but still
>> quite a lot of people. One can fairly safely assume, I think, that
>> there are readers/"customers" among these visitors, who are getting a
>> pretty good deal, I reckon, since they get to "consume" it all for
>> free.
>
>Why, then, do you suppose that the editor said she had no customers
>and no vendors?
>
>Marcus
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