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Vallance Review 48. August 2005 SONNETTO POESIA
INTRODUCTION To celebrate the fourth anniversary of The Vallance Review, Poetry Life & Times, we turn our attention this month to SONNETTO POESIA's conversion from an e-zine to a print journal [1] as of the spring 2005 issue (Vol. 4 no. 2). Ever since its inception as a sonnet journal in the winter of 2002, SONNETTO POESIA (hereafter referred to as SP in this review) was published uniquely as an e-zine. As early as the fall of 2004, the editor of SP, Richard Vallance, in consultation with several sonneteers from his inner circle of poet friends in Canada, the USA and the UK, had been seriously considering making the switchover from an e-zine to a print journal. As long as SP remained an e-zine on the Internet, its audience could potentially be anyone anywhere in the world connected to the World Wide Web, within the bounds of certain distinct demographic and literary constraints which we will outline in this review. On the other hand, the decision to publish SP in print format only would mean the instantaneous loss of SP's previously acquired Internet audience, large or small, captive or otherwise. It is apparent to anyone familiar with the business of publishing that there are distinct advantages and disadvantages to publishing in each of these media, online and print. We will list the pros and cons for each medium in turn. While these may at first sight appear to be fairly clear cut to readers not familiar with the intricacies of publishing, we will soon enough see that such is not necessarily the case at all. Criteria for Evaluation
Before proceeding to the discussion of the (dis)advantages of publishing a journal online or in print, we need of course to establish our base criteria, in order to include in our study only the class of journals eligible to be brought under due consideration, excluding all others of no direct relevance. 1. First and foremost, we are dealing here with a poetry journal or review, and specifically with one primarily limited to one and one only poetic genre, the sonnet. SP may also occasionally publish quatrains, villanelles and ballads, and other poetic forms closely related to the sonnet. Still, the base of poetry genres eligible for publication is clearly restricted to a few formal poetry genres. 2. Secondly, with SP, we are dealing a professional literary journal. SP is not a popular or commercial journal in any sense of that term, whether it be published in e-zine or in print form. 3. SP has always been a quarterly journal, both online and in print. The reasons for this are manifold. Some of the more prominent are: Readers can expect to see sonnets pubished in several other languages, including, notwithstanding, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch [2] and possibly even Japanese. Naturally, by allowing sonnets in several major world languages to qualify for submission to SP, we thus culturally expand our submissions base significantly. Our willingness to accept multilingual submissions counteracts the restrictions to submissions outlined in 3.1 above. Fortunately for our unilingual English readers, all sonnets originally composed in languages other than English are translated on parallel pages into English in SP. We can best designate it as a literary review with a targeted audience, indeed a very minuscule targeted audience of readers. How so? In retrospect, history has demonstrated that, ever since the Renaissance at least, when larger and larger numbers of people progressively attained more advanced levels of education, whether formal or informal, readership of books and print materials of all kinds, including magazines, journals and reviews, reached ever wider audiences. Reader audiences for populist or popular magazines blossomed into the millions in the nineteenth century, and hundreds of millions in the twentieth. The vast number of people worldwide who read journals in e-zine or print form today, in the early twenty-first century, has reached incalculable proportions. At the same time, right from the Renaissance on, other journals began to specialize. As early as the late sixteenth century, William Shakespeare's sonnets had already been published in their own folio edition in London, separately from all his plays.
The eighteenth century witnessed the appearance of all sorts of naturalist and new scientific reviews. By the nineteenth century there were specialized journals in all fields of knowledge and science, while by the twentieth century, the sheer range of these “specialized” journals had reached almost epidemic proportions. A great many of these specialized journals were circumscribed to ever narrower fields of science, such as biology, molecular biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy and astrophysics (to name but a few). Add to this all the newly emerging fields of technology, including, amongst so many others, aviation, space technology, computers, microtechnology and biotechnology and the sheer diversity of narrowly specialized publications becomes nothing short of mind boggling. Likewise, other fields of knowledge in the humanities, such as history, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, literature, and in the last instance, specific subclasses including: new forms of the novel (Henry James, Henry Miller etc.), post-modern criticism, and new trends in poetry further add to the confusing welter of specialized periodicals. Journals in this class have for some time been the purview of fairly clearly targeted audiences, and in some instances, of captive readers [3] as a subclass of captive audiences [4]. Journals in narrow fields of science and technology, such as intergalactic astrophysics or computer journals aimed at LINUX or MAC users have more or less captive audiences. In reality, though, there is no such thing as a captive audience, since even readers of reviews completely devoted to LINUX or MAC can decide at any time to subscribe or unsubscribe to any particular journal. On the other hand, the very same readers, being a targeted audience, will very likely want to subscribe to another review in the same area of specialization. Most specialized literary journals also tend to fall in this latter class. Academic journals of all kinds are the domain of even smaller targeted audiences, viz. highly educated individuals or groups researching or in search of a specialized class of knowledge. Whether published as an e-zine or in print, SONNETTO POESIA distinctly falls into the class of limited targeted audience literary journals, for the following reasons: 1. SP is not only a poetry journal, which automatically limits it to a very small targeted audience, viz; only persons truly interested in reading poetry over other genres, such as the novel or short stories, but it is, to put our finger squarely on it, a sonnet journal only. This means that its targeted or “captive” audience is even smaller, in fact, much much smaller than that of a “general” poetry journal (if there is such a beast). In the general population of readers worldwide, it is more than likely that only a very small percentage read poetry on a regular basis, while far fewer ever bother to read sonnets. There is one final consideration we need to keep very firmly in mind when evaluating the outer limits of a sonnet journal's potential reader audience, and it is this: while the reader base for sonnets is minuscule, the number of poets worldwide actually writing sonnets is much, much smaller, in any period of history, even today, in the early twenty-first century, where the world population approaches seven billion. The primary reason for this bizarre literary phenomenon is actually quite simple, at least on the surface of things: the sonnet is one of the most structurally demanding of poetry forms for any poet to master. Thus, historically, very few poets dared tackle the prickly sonnet as a poetry genre. Lamentably, today, in a world where slipshod poetry writing dominates the Internet, the primary medium for the transmission of knowledge in our day and age, even fewer poets, professional or amateur, ever bother trying to acquire even the rudiments of sonnet composition. 2. On the other hand, a highly specialized poetry journal such as SONNETTO POESIA must perforce exert a powerful appeal on the very targeted audience I have just identified above in 1: that very small readership base of people who love to read sonnets, duly served by the much smaller class of scrupulous poets who cherish writing them. 3. As a corollary of the first two factors above, a poetry journal such as SP, even as an Internet e-zine, can, almost by definition, directly appeal only to the tiniest of readership bases. The cumulative visitor counters for all issues of SP bears this out, while the counter on SP's home page has reached approx. 1,700 visitors (still a very small number, by any account). Does this mean SP is a failure as a journal? Not at all. Having said all this, we will be basing all our conclusions re. the pros and cons of publishing SP either as an e-zine or a print journal on the criteria we have just outlined. SONNETTO POESIA as an E-Zine Pros and Cons 1. Although the potential audience for a sonnet e-zine such as SP is extremely limited by our own rather strict definition, by making it available online on the Internet, we are in fact opening up its potential audience to many more readers than we could possibly do otherwise in print, since the Internet is spread all over the globe, while publishing any poetry journal exclusively in print automatically limits it to its base of actual subscribers. In the case of a sonnet journal, as per our criteria outlined above, that readership base is bound to be particularly small for a sonnet journal in print. 2. By making SP available online on the Internet, we are de facto offering our journal to the entire world for free, which is great for anyone with access to the Internet. Of course, as everybody knows, folks love getting something for nothing. If it’s free, I’ll read it, why not? People who would otherwise not read sonnets at all might be tempted to read one or two in a free online e-zine, whereas the same individuals would probably be a lot less inclined to pay for a sonnet journal in print. 3. It is a relatively inexpensive affair for the webmaster to administer and run an e-zine. Most internet home page or site providers, such as Yahoo Geocities, MSN/Lycos Tripod and Homestead.com all provide the prospective e-zine pubisher with the basic tools for the construction, layout and design of his or her e-zine. However, the versatility and extent of these tools varies enormously from one site provider to another; so buyer beware! Being private, the marketplace for home page providers is pretty much unregulated. So annual fees vary considerably and are often subject to sudden increases with little or no prior notice. Some site providers are more liable to hike annual fees on a regular basis than others. Once again, caveat emptor. E-zine publishers are thus faced with an initial startup administrative fee + the fee for their first annual subscription, with subsequent annual subscription fees subject to increases, often out of a clear blue sky. 4. Online e-zines allow for real versatiliy and variety in graphical and textual layout. Of course, e-zine graphical layout and design is a subset of website design in general. And we all know the Internet is a virtual cornucopia of manuals, guides, tips and techniques, all too often contradictory, on how to “best” design a website. These educational website design sites provide the potential home page designer with widely differing criteria for constructing a website, depending, once again, on the targeted audience, and in some instances, its presumed captive audience. Web site designers of gambling sites, which now proliferate on the internet, will surely want to capture as many hapless gamblers as they possibly can with as dazzling an interface as they can dream of to rake in the bucks. Altogether alien to sites such as these are the basic criteria for designing literary and poetry e-zines. Sadly, even in this latter arena, many home page designers miserably fail. For instance, too many changes in e-zine layout and design, from page to page and from issue to issue can be distracting, even maddening, to readers. Altering page layout in a single issue is potentially a more serious problem for the e-zine editor and for his reader audience than is changing e-zine design from issue to issue. The best rule of thumb is to stick pretty much to the same design template for every issue, so that your reader audience can immediately and uniquely identify your own e-zine as distinct from all others on the internet by its graphical interface. Alas, even this aim is impractical in a less than ideal world of web site providers, since so many of them use the exact same or only sightly varied templates for site designs. Fortunately, though, some web site providers, such as Homestead.com, offer a veritable banquet of website templates for the publisher to feast on. These are usually the more expensive providers. See cons below for further discussion of this issue. 5. One of the biggest bugbears for readers of e-zines is the editor's choice(s) of fonts. The editor's choice of font(s) has a powerful impact on his readers at all levels, above all, psychological. Is the main text font for the poems and the editorial consistent? Is it large enough? What constitutes large enough? Is it restful on the eyes? Is the font dark on a light background or the other way around. Most people find it much easier to read a black font on a soft white background, or at least a dark font, such as navy blue, on such a background. Setting your e-zine in a funky weird colour font such as electric orange on a purple background won't win you many readers or fans, unless they are just as funky as you are. 6. Another very effective way to uniquely identify your journal, regardless of the field it publishes in, is to apply for an ISSN (International Serial Number) from your country's national library, and to assign this ISSN to your journal. Your e-zine's unique ISSN makes it literally impossible for any other e-zine or print journal in the world to be confused with yours, even if it bears the same title, word for word. For instance, let's say for the sake of argument there were 2 journals in the world with the title, SONNETTO POESIA. Now, the one with ISSN 1705-4524 is the particular journal discussed in this review, and not the other one. Moreover, any e-zine or journal with an ISSN is legally catalogued with its country's national library. Furthermore, any journal assigned an ISSN is more stringently protected by international copyright laws, since its publisher/ editor can legally prove with ease that the journal is in fact his or her own. Lastly, all contents of journals with ISSN are also more closely protected by copyright laws, as are the copyright privileges of each and every contributor to every issue. Essentially, then, what we are saying here is quite simply this: if you are going to publish your own (poetry) journal, whether in e-zine or in print format, get an ISSN. This becomes almost a sink or swim requirement for journals in print, as we shall see below. 7. The more frequently you publish your e-zine, the faster you will use up your home page provider's allowable disc space for your account. All site providers have such limits, which vary from a low of 20 megabytes (ridiculously inadequate if you use any graphics worth mentioning), to 50 megabytes (still far too restrictive for publishing for more than 2-3 years), to 100 megabytes (decent but still quite limited) to as much as a gigabyte. But, of course, the more space the site provider offers, the likelier the annual fee will be steeper. Another warning: site providers who offer large disc space often trade this perk off for fewer and less versatile site development and graphic tools. So you have to shop around and you have to choose very wisely. All things considered, this reviewer/ editor/ publisher clearly prefers Homestead.com over all other site providers for offering the most versatile range of site building tools and the most powerful interface, prescribed however by their general account limit of 100 megabytes per customer. This is about enough to publish one major website, and two e-zines for about 5 years, so long as the web master does not get carried away in a froth with too many fancy graphics. 8. It is of course necessary to promote your e-zine on the Internet if you wish to attract more and more readers. There are several useful ways to accomplish this, such as:
along with only 23 other sonnet sites wordwide, excluding sites specifically dealing with the sonnets of William Shakespeare (of which there are 34 sites). SP is ranked as the one and only sonnet e-zine or print journal of its kind in the entire world in this subcategory on the Open Directory, along with other such illustrious sonnet sites as Early English Sonnets, John Donne -- Holy Sonnets, Sonnet Central (the world's largest historical sonnet clearinghouse by far) and The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke. SP is in prestigious company. The crucial thing to remember here is that, unless you promote your own poetry e-zine, it may just go largely unnoticed on the Internet. It is far more important for the webmaster to promote his or her e-zine where that e-zine is, like SP, limited to a minuscule targeted readership audience to begin with. Otherwise, the e-zine will simply be submerged in the massive information glut the Internet represents, especially in a discipline already as narrow as poetry. 9. E-zine providers often forget to apply for a unique domain name for their e-zine(s) or simply decide not to bother with one. Of course, if you want your own URL for your e-zine, you must pay an additional annual fee over and above the fee you disburse to your web site provider. Fortunately, if you shop around that fee can be as low as $10 per year, provided you purchase your domain for an extended time period block, usually 5 years. The editor of SP has so far chosen not to purchase a unique domain name for his e-zine, as he has never really been certain whether he would keep the journal online on the Internet for more than five years. And, wouldn't you know, he hasn't kept it online that long. Acquiring your own unique domain name or URL is not the same thing at all as relying on the domain name of your Internet web site provider. Allow me to illustrate. If you publish your e-zine through the auspices of your web site provider, as the editor of SONNETTO POESIA does, then every time you publish a new issue of your e-zine, you must create an entirely new web page. And even when you do, the base URL of your web site provider is suffixed to the partial domain name of your new web page's sub-URL prefix, along with the subdomain terminating designator “index.html” used to indicate that this is the first page of the current issue. Thus, if the URL of your home site provider is (as it is with SP), http://www.homestead.com/, and if you assign your latest issue of your e-zine the web page URL of: http://sonnettopoesiavol3n12004.homestead.com/index.html On the other hand, a poetry e-zine such as Poetry Life & Times, has a shorter, more “intuitive” URL for each issue, because it is assigned a subscribed URL, http://www.poetrylifeandtimes.com/current.html (and notice the complete absence of the “index.html” subdomain from its URL) In the case of SONNETTO POESIA, even its home page has a longer URL, because it is a subdomain of Homestead.com, namely; http://sonnettopoesiahome.homestead.com/index.html. The publisher of SP fully intends, however, to purchase a unique domain for SP, especially since he is now publishing the journal only in print. See the section below on SP in print for more on this.
The first 2 issues of SONNETTO POESIA in print While publishing poetry journal as an e-zine is one kettle of fish, publishing it in print only, even at the same frequency (quarterly) is altogether quite another. While the two publishing media share a few salient characteristics, they have far fewer in common. A quarterly periodical [5] such as SONNETTO POESIA ISSN 1705-4524 must be published according to a predefined fixed schedule, as are all periodicals in print without exception worth their salt. Subscribers expect to receive their quarterly issues within a reasonable brief timeframe after the date of publication, which in the case of SP is December 21, March 21, June 21 and September 21 for the winter, spring, summer and fall issues respectively. It is unwise business practice for any editor/ publisher to delay publication of a periodical, thereby placing himself at risk of losing subscribers annoyed at not getting their quarterly issues “on time”, when their annual subscriptions come up for renewal. This is not an issue at all with an e-zine, since the latter is free and no-one “subscribes” to it. On the other hand, editors who publish their journals in print receive a steady (and generally increasing income) from their subscriber base, which helps to offset their supply, production, printing, administrative and mailing costs. By following the sequence of the pros and cons of publishing our poetry/ sonnet e-zine point for point, we can easily discern the advantages and disadvantages of publishing it as a journal in print instead. 1. As long as SP was available as an e-ziine online on the Internet, it could feasibly reach a much greater potential audience of many more readers than we could ever hope to corral for it as a periodical in print. Clearly, publishing any poetry journal in print automatically limits it to its base of actual subscribers. In the case of SP that readership base is bound to be very small if it is published only as a print periodical. On the other hand, as we have just illustrated in our introductory paragraph to this section, a poetry e-zine publisher cannot recover costs, because there simply does not exist any real subscription base. Of course, many Internet aficionados will argue that you can password protect your e-zine, and subsequently charge readers for it via credit card. The downsides to following this rocky path are numerous and thorny. For instance, if an Internet surfer reaches your e-zine site, and discovers he or she must pay to read every online issue, how is he or she guaranteed, however marginally, that the e-zine is even worth reading? Is the poetry any good? Are the editorials decent? Is the e-zine professionally presented? Trust me on this one: given the vast number of really slovenly poetry e-zines pumped out on the Internet, is it any wonder that the potential online “subscriber” is going to really think twice before taking the leap? Secondly, there is a very strong resistence amongst millions of Internet users ever to use the Web for credit card transactions, given the level of fraud that prevails in this unregulated medium. Thirdly, even if the e-zine is highly respectible and its published poems are generally of high literary calibre, who in their right mind would want to pay for reading these poems (here, sonnets) when they can almost certainly find the same poems by searching or googling them elsewhere on the Internet, given the fact that most poets who publish online do so multiply? We could go on, but you get the picture. But, the same aficionados will surely object, “Well, how do you know you are getting a decent literary journal when you subscribe to SP in print? That is a moot question. Fundamentally, the answer is, it had damn well better a quality print journal, or its subscriber base will swiftly vanish into thin air. In other words, it is the print journal publisher's responsibility to make certain he is publishing a quality product for his subscribers and for those readers who decide to purchase single issues on an instinctive hunch. Disappoint them and they're history. So is your periodical. Such is far from being the case with free Internet e-zines, all too many of which have a distinct reputation for being uneven at best, and sometimes downright slovenly at worst. But heck, if they’re free, who cares? 2. By publishing SP as a periodical [5] in print, we immediately lose the advantage of a worldwide reader audience, comprised of any and all with any kind of access to the Internet, private or public. On the other hand, we position ourselves to open up the journal to a base of truly literate subscribers, who love to read poetry and specifically sonnets, a subscriber base which we sincerely hope will gradually grow over the next few years. There are tools available to publishers to assist them in expanding their subscription base. Publication directories are one of these tools. It is crucial for a journal editor to try and select a publishing directory as closely matched as is practically possible to his or her publication. Here again, we are dealing with a targeted audience for the directory, which in turn steers its readers to journals in print directly corresponding to its actual market. Conversely, as editors, we want the readership base of the directory or directories we list our periodical in to mirror as closely as possible the targeted readership market of our journal. In the case of SP, this means we should, if at all possible, list the periodical in a poetry journal directory, preferably one that is subject indexed for rapid access to journals by thematic content or poetry genre(s). Poet's Market (Cincinnati, Ohio). The editor of SP contacted the editor of Poet's Market, Nancy Breen, early in 2005, well before the publication of the very first issue of SONNETTO POESIA in print, to ensure that, if accepted for directory listing, SP would appear in the forthcoming annual directory. Poetry journal publishers and editors should realize that the application forms for potential listing in such professional directories as Writer's Market and Poet's Market are extremely time-consuming and labour intensive, requiring the utmost attention to detail in describing and enumerating every aspect of a new journal entry likely to interest anyone consulting such a directory. This is a crucial point of departure for marketing; so if you want to have your journal accepted for listing in any such directory, better to do a professional job of submission. Moroever, some directories charge editors and publishers to list. Fortunately, Poet's Market does not. The editorial staff at Poet's Market replied to the publisher of SP in the affirmative even before he got it in print. SP will consequently be listed in the 2006 edition of Poet's Market, to be released this month, August 2005. Having a poetry journal listed in a well-established international directory such as this is not only a hallmark of your periodical's literary prestige, but ensures that at least library users and online Internet subscribers to the directory will have access to all the bibliographic information on the journal itself, right down to the minutest detail, including submission guidelines. It is patently impossible to publish finely detailed bibliographic data of such depth and scope in an online e-zine, without overwhelming Internet surfers with a heap of information they are almost certain to pay little or no attention to, anymore than most most of them are likely at all to devote themselves to reading in extenso the boring details of user agreements online. However, people who take the trouble to go to a library or to subscribe to a directory online for their own research purposes are far more likely to search out detailed bibliographic data to help them decide whether or not they wish to subscribe to any particular journal title. There is one final and vital consideration we must not overlook: while it is risky at best for Internet surfers to subscribe to e-zines which charge readers to consult their contents, a comprehensive publishers' directory such as Poet's Market provides minute detail(s) on every journal or periodical listed, provided that the editor/publisher takes the due time and careful effort required to accurately and completely fill out the data for his periodical. That is precisely what the editor of SP did. 3. We already know that e-zines are fairly inexpensive to administer and run. Such is not the case with publishing a poetry periodical in print, even on as infrequent a basis as quarterly. If the journal is published monthly, the overall cost of publication rises dramatically, not threefold over quarterly publication, as you might expect, but much more steeply than that, due to the costs of so many physical factors and variables involved in publishing a journal in print. At the very minimum these costs include: the cost of purchasing paper and cover stock supplies for the periodicity of the journal (quarterly or monthly); the actual cost of printing itself, which may be accomplished by a variety of means, anywhere from laser printing on the editor's own machine, the least expensive option (which however necessitates purchasing new toner cartridges on a regular basis, and more frequently as the number of subscriptions rises), to the more expensive on demand publishing by a supplier the publisher relies on, to the priciest option, professional printing by a large commercial printing establishment. Other overhead costs include: mailing subscriptions nationally and internationally, which in turn usually implies higher subscription rates for out-of-country subscribers to cover higher mailing costs; administrative costs such as accounting and subscriber lists; commission costs related to selling the journal in magazine or bookstore outlets; equipment replacement costs (such as of laser printers, computers and other related hardware, all likely to wear out faster than otherwise might be expected, due to heavier use). And the list goes on. The publisher of SONNETTO POESIA has estimated that the cost of printing the 50 copies of the very first issue of SP (Vol. 4 no. 2, spring 2005), including new equipment investment, was at least $600. Since only about 20 copies of the original issue were either sold as subscriptions or as units, the publisher only recovered about $150. This scenario is to be expected for the very first issue of any journal in print, given initial higher startup costs. The editor estimates the cost of printing 50 copies of the summer 2005 issue of SP (Vol. 4 no. 3) as being considerably less, in the range of $200. Meanwhile, subscriptions are on the rise; so we are approaching something like cost recovery. Ideally, subscribers should be reasonably aware of the fact that small subscription based journal editors almost never operate for reasons of profit, let alone fully recover costs. Any serious minded literary journal, especially one with as narrowly targeted a readership base as a sonnet journal, has as its primary aim and mission not profit making or “cashing in” on its subscribers, but rather introducing a poetic genre as refined as the sonnet to those few poetry literate readers in the world who are likely to truly appreciate its rare and polished beauty. 4. While online e-zines allow for real versatiliy and variety in graphical and textual layout, almost the very opposite rule-of-thumb applies to poetry journals in print. Small publishers of poetry journals in print, such as the editor of SP, are severely limited and stretched for resources, and must make the utmost best of those they readily have at their disposition. At the very outset, well before publishing even the first issue of his or her journal in print, any editor/ publisher on a shoestring budget must make some tough crucial decisions. Not the least of these is, “How do I make the transition from an e-zine to a print journal as smooth and non-disruptive as possible?” Again, far easier said than done. There are some reasonably effective common sense approaches to this conundrum. First of all WARN your e-zine readers well in advance, with a prominently displayed banner notice on the e-zine's home page, that you are really going to make the switch over to a periodical in print. A lead period of six months is highly advisable. Sadly, the editor of SP only had four months, but that's still better than nothing. The announcement should be accompanied with the initially proposed subscription rates, so that your potential new subscribers have at least some idea of what they are expected to pay. The editor of SP initially set subscription rates at $10 per year and $4.00 per issue, but soon realized this was a fundamental error related to -production costs outlined in 3. above. It rapidly dawned on him that the mailing costs for international subscriptions would be much too high to justify such a subscription rate for non-Canadian subscribers. Consquently, starting with the summer 2005 issue, the subscription rate for Canadian subscribers remains at $10 C per year, while for all other subscribers outside Canada, it is $15 USD per year. The per issue cost remains at $4.00 + mailing costs, where required. Limited as our editor is to black and white printing only on a laser printer, he finally decides to resort to the use of 19th. century lithographic etchings by none other than Miles Birket Foster (1825-1899), the renowned illustrator of books by such great poets as John Milton, William Wordsworth and John Keats. The solution is both simple and elegant. The line drawings are all strikingly beautiful, and all the more so when printed on colour cover stock. The cover stock varies in colour with each season: pastel green for spring, pastel yellow for summer, pastel red (or pink) for autumn and light blue or white for winter. Because the cover stock is quite thick (67 bond), SONNETTO POESIA, while a small poetry periodical (14 X 21.5 cm), feels firm in your hands, and is easy to read, thanks to its low gloss, bright white bond paper amenable to any light source. Being constrained to the use of graphics in black & white only, the publisher of SP decides to compensate generously for this deficiency by printing the periodical on as high quality cover and paper stock as economically possible, allowing for durability and resistance to wear and tear over time. He chooses acid free 67 weight colour stock for the cover and 25 weight acid free bright Weyerhauser paper stock. Journal publishers on limited financial resources trying to cut corners for so-called “cost effectiveness” often neglect this consideration, but rest assured your readers will notice the difference. The publisher of SP has therefore opted for high quality colour cover stock with simple B & W illustrations complemented by superior paper stock. In order to save precious toner resources, he has also opted against illustrations inside the journal itself. This is a primary factor in the publication of any journal printed by laser. The more illustrations you use, the faster your toner depletes. What with each toner cartridge costing at least $100, printing costs can mount rapidly. Far better to illustrate the cover with one truly striking artistic design, and to leave the contents in print form only. After all, this is a literary sonnet journal. Readers aren't subscribing to it to look at pictures, however beautiful. They subscribe because they truly enjoy reading sonnets. Go figure. One last bit of advice. Don't even consider publishing your poetry periodical with an inkjet printer. Inkjet printed publications always smudge, especially if water gets on them. Laser printed publications not only do not easily smudge, they look much more professional to readers. Laser printing produces far more even looking, crisper character and line impressions than any inkjet printer, other than the most expensive, can hope to achieve. Even expensive inkjet printers still smudge, while even inexpensive laser printers don't smudge easily at all, and produce consistently good print results. Bottom line: print with a laser printer if you must print yourself. For the sake of emphasis, I repeat what I mentioned in the section on e-zine publishing: “Altogether alien are the basic criteria for designing literary and poetry e-zines.” With a minor change to the next sentence, we can draw a strikingly similar conclusion about publishing a journal in print, viz: sadly, many publishers of print journals actually fail to design an appealing periodical their readers are bound to enjoy. The aforementioned comments would seem to illustrate that point decisively enough. 5. If the fundamental criterion to adhere to as few font and design changes applies to e-zines as much as it does (and it surely does), that same criterion must be taken much more literally where a poetry journal is produced in print. Where a poetry periodical in print is concerned, the failsafe rule is never change your fonts. It is possible to use two different fonts, one for the cover (inside and out), and other for the contents pages. If they are to be restful on the readers' eyes, the fonts chosen must not be changed, even from issue to issue, unless by some miraculous chance the editor stumbles upon an even more readable and eye-pleasing font. The font selected for all of SP's covers is the elegant Grail Light Bold, which beautifully offsets the cover illustrations, while the contents font is that old stand-by workhorse, the clear, crisp Times New Roman, 14 point plain. The contents of the initial issue of SP in print were set in Times New Roman, 12 point bold, but the editor received complaints about its being too strong or “in your face”. Message received, loud and clear. The second issue, set in Times New Roman, 14 point plain, is much easier on the eyes. Once again, simplicity of text presentation is the key criterion. If the publisher gets carried away trying to razzle-dazzle his or her readers with all sorts of funky fonts, woe to that editor for the probable ensuing criticisms and consequences. 6. If assigning an ISSN to a poetry e-zine was “a very good idea at the time”, it is next to godliness where a poetry periodical in print is concerned. The reasons for this are manifold, but allow me to cite the most practical of these. If you have pre-assigned your periodical an ISSN, it thereby becomes quite literally impossible for anyone else to subsequently publish any e-zine or periodical in print with the same exact title as your own, unless the publisher of the new e-zine or journal assigns an ISSN to his or her publication to contradistinguish it from your own. Magazine titles, such as “Time” or “Life” (to cite two titles as oft repeated notorious examples) are particularly liable to create real confusion amongst potential readers, since identical titles rarely indicate anything meaningful about their contents. Moreover, publishers of new journals, who appropriate the titles of previous periodicals with the exact same title and with its own unique ISSN, and who don't bother to acquire their own ISSN, are liable to legal pursuit. It has happened many times before; it will happen again. The only truly unique identifier for any magazine, journal, periodical or e-zine is its ISSN. There is no other. Not only does the ISSN uniquely identify the journal, it even clearly indicates its country of origin. For instance, journals in the ISSN series beginning with the four digits ISSN 1705 are Canadian. The last four digits identify the periodical specifically by title, in the case of SONNETTO POESIA = 4524, hence, ISSN 1705-4524. So what's the bottom line? If you are going to publish your poetry journal in print, you'd be best advised and cool and wise to get yourself its own unique ISSN, to avoid any hassles, legal or otherwise. 7. The more frequently you publish your poetry periodical in print, the higher your production costs will be. Regardless of periodicity (monthly, quarterly or otherwise), if your poetry journal achieves a modicum of “popularity” in its subscriber base, word will get around, and your subscriptions will increase over time, in turn generating yet higher publication costs. Inflation must also be taken into consideration with every passing year. Eventually, as a poetry print journal publisher, you may very well have to pass on increased production costs to your subscribers. Even so, it is highly advisable for publishers not to raise subscription rates suddenly, with little or no prior notice, or to raise them substantially all at once. That is one sure way to drive off existing subscribers. As a publisher, you are best off taking full responsibility for your subscription rates, by letting your customers know well in advance of any subscription rate increase you plan on. It is even more advisable if you survey your customers and ask them for their input into any planned changes in your journal's periodicity, layout and design and, above all, its subscription rates, where it really hits their pocketbooks. Many publishers of print journals simply fail to inform their subscribers of their plans, putative or concrete, for such essential policy changes, much to their eventual chagrin. 8. Just as it is necessary for you, as an e-zine publisher to promote your e-zine on the Internet, the same criterion applies to advertising your print poetry journal, except that some of the techniques you will rely on may need to be a little different. You can still: 9. While a domain name is de rigueur for an e-zine, such is far from the case with a poetry periodical in print. In fact, many publishers of print poetry journals still do not advertise their publications on the Internet. However, more and more do advertise on the net, in some form or another. One way is to have your print journal listed in an online poetry journal directory. Alternatively, a more effective strategy is to get your poetry periodical listed in a market directory, such as Poet's Market, which is available both in print and online. In any case, you should be aware that online users of such directories will have to pay to subscribe to them and consult them, while readers and researchers who consult the print version of the same directory have merely to visit their local library to consult it for free. Yet another very effective strategy is to pay for annual advertising space for your poetry journal in another poetry journal, preferably a national one with high circulation. Poetry Canada, published by The Canadian Federation of Poets, currently offers a large advert space in each of its quarterly issues for the very reasonable rate of $250 per annum. The editor of SONNETTO POESIA is seriously considering advertising his journal in Poetry Canada. Once again, though, a poetry journal publisher must take into due consideration the fact that advertising in such a large circulation national journal is bound to increase the subscription base, possibly even dramatically, resulting of course in significantly higher administrative and production costs. The trick here is to make your move to advertising in a national journal at a highly opportune moment for you as a publisher/editor. I have noted that a URL is part and parcel of publishing an e-zine. No URL, no e-zine, simple as that. The situation is somewhat fuzzier where periodicals in print are concerned. As a publisher of a print journal, you have to seriously ask yourself whether having a home page for your periodical is even worth your trouble, if indeed your entire subscription base consists of readers who don't really care about seeing it on the Internet, but simply want to read their subscription issues. Pretty basic stuff, eh? Well, yes and no. If you have been publishing your poetry journal as an e-zine for a few years, it will already have a home site, presumably one on which you list your current issue and all back issues, as do the editors of SONNETTO POESIA, Poetry Life & Times and Autumn Leaves ISSN 1547-156X (USA, Sondra Ball, editor). In this case, it would be tantamount to advertising suicide to cancel or delete your poetry journal's home page, since it will have already captured a fairly large Internet audience (your past e-zine issue readers), many of whom are quite likely to inform others with similar reading interests of the existence of your home page. So why shoot the messenger? Allow me to draw your attention to one final point. If your former poetry e-zine had its own home page, and that home page was provided through the auspices of your web site provider (such as Homestead.com), you would be best advised to purchase your own URL, annually renewed. This way, everyone who is already familiar with your journal as an e-zine will be able to access it by its own unique URL. The importance of this move at this juncture, as you switch over to publishing your periodical in print, cannot be overemphasized. Still, it is vital that you inform all of your e-mail contacts to the earlier e-zine that its URL has been changed, and that you give them its new, simplfied URL. Even more importantly than this, you will want to advertise your new print periodical's home page URL on the inside front cover of each issue, so that subscribers to the journal itself may navigate to its home page, where they can access and read all the e-zine back issues, which are free to read for anyone with access to the Internet, private or public. As I mentioned earlier in this review, it is the publisher's full intention to purchase a unique domain name for SONNETTO POESIA's home page, now that he is publishing the journal only in print. SP's unique domain name should come into effect as early as New Year's 2006. Naturally, of course, online Internet users who navigate to SP's home page will not be able to read any of its print issues, i.e. all issues from Vol. 4 no. 2, spring 2005 onwards. Everyone, including subscribers to the journal in print, will however be able to read all of its back issues as an e-zine. The main purpose of the journal's home page is no longer merely the provision of e-zine back issues for everyone to read at leisure and at no cost to themselves, but to actively promote the printed periodical and to strongly encourage sonnet lovers to pay the minimal subscription fee we charge for the pleasure of reading a literary poetry journal of such high calibre. So, if sonnets are your cup of tea and you haven't yet subscribed to SONNETTO POESIA, why not take the plunge? Subscription information details are suffixed to this review and all Vallance Reviews, displayed on the first page of each current issue of Poetry Life & Times, and of course on SP's own home page. Coming next month, September 2005, What, Contemporary Sonnets on Cats? Meow!
Yes, you heard me right. We shall turn our feline-loving attention to none other than contemporary sonnets on cats. Cats have been the subject of poetry since time immemorial. It is said that Francesco Petrarch, the first truly great sonneteer in history, was devoted to his cat only a little less than to his beloved Laura, the shining star in the glorious firmament of his sonnets. Ever since sonnets have been written, there have always been sonneteers who have adored cats, and celebrated them in their sonnets. Vallance Review 49, September 2005, will first provide us with some of the more memorable examples of historical sonnets on our little feline friends, before turning to contemporary sonneteers who are so mad about their cats that they too just can't help themselves from composing ditties to their kitties. © by Richard Vallance July 14 2005, with the editorial assistance of Pamela Murray (Canada) & Jim Dunlap (USA) [1] In this review, poetry magazines such as SP are designated interchangeably as: magazines, reviews, journals or periodicals, although the first term in this list generally refers mostly to popular magazines, while the second most often designates periodicals or journals which include book reviews, film reviews or other critical reviews. For instance, Poetry Life & Times is most accurately defined as a poetry review because it contains monthly interviews of contemporary poets and the Vallance Review. We reach a captive readership of 40,000 with every issue - all looking for information to inform their purchasing needs. So if you want to increase sales or awareness of what you offer, talk to us about your marketing objectives and we’ll show you how Parental Eye Magazine can help you reach them. So what we have here is a highly targeted marketing magazine boasting about its ability to reach its “captive” reader audience! Whether or not such a “captive” audience exists in reality is quite another question, but the magazine claims it does. Hundreds of similar claims can be found in e-zines and especially in print magazines. [3.2] Here is an even better example of a print airline magazine Media Seen, with a circulation of 80,000 copies per issue to over a MILLION airline passengers “trapped” on flights with Indian Airlines and Alliance Air. Of course, any major world airline could make a similar boast, whether it holds water or not. These are just two examples out of hundreds we could easily find in any Internet search on Google. [4] dictionary.com (thesaurus) defines, “captive audience” as: “Listeners or onlookers who have no choice but to attend. For example, It's a required course and, knowing he has a captive audience, the professor rambles on endlessly. This expression, first recorded in 1902, uses captive in the sense of "unable to escape."[5] A periodical is specifically defined as a journal or review published periodically, and almost always on the same periodical timetable, whether montly, bimonthly, quarterly or annually. SONNETTO POESIA has been a quarterly periodical in print as of Vol. 4 no. 2, spring 2005.
Richard Vallance is the author of: Canadian Federation of Poets: Poetry Lessons: Lesson & Exercise - Week 18 SONNETS in The Canadian Federation of Poets weekly Poetry Progress Lessons & Exercises series The Vallance Review is frequently cited in our Canadian sonnet journal, SONNETTO POESIA ISSN 1706-4524. SONNETTO POESIA is published quarterly in print & is advertised on the front page of the current issue of Poetry Life and Times. If you wish to subscribe to SONNETTO POESIA, you may contact the editor, Richard Vallance. To read the earlier e-zine back issues, you may visit the sonnet journal's Home Page here: 
This notice will appear in résumé form in future Vallance Reviews. |
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