Welp, its 2023 and American Wayfarer is stumbling it's way into our second year of life as a garage publication company. We've learned a lot from our first year of operations and we are eager to hit the ground running as we role into the second.
Some of the things we've learned are going to change the way we operate going forward and we thought we might as well note some changes and enter them into the historical record of our little company to chronicle our failures. But, like old Grandpa Homer likes to say, "There's no shame in making mistakes, only shame in refusing to learn from mistakes." So here we are. Consider these our New Year's resolutions of a sort...
1.We Are Scaling Back American Wayfarer Magazine
American Wayfarer Magazine was envisioned as a bi-monthly publication spotlighting interesting little towns and oddities from all over the country. We intended to keep them around 48 pages for cheap fast reads. The problem we've discovered is that when publishing magazines on the Amazon Kindle store, the minimum price point for our image-heavy files is $2.99. While we think that 48 pages is decent for a .99 cent pdf, it comes in a little short for a 3-dollar investment. We decided late in the year that 2 of our scheduled publications that would have been serviceable if sold for a buck really didn't cut the mustard if we had to list them for $2.99. Both have been delayed to allow our writers time to beef them up with additional content in order to justify Amazon's price point. There's nothing wrong with that but, going forward, as we will have to be producing publications with higher price and longer content expectations, its inevitable that we will need more time and resources to invest in them. We still hope to release the magazine on a quarterly basis in addition to other projects like American Wayfarer Presents.
2. Social Media
Look, we admit it... we hate social media. We're not good at it. It confuses and depresses us most of the time. BUT, we also acknowledge that activity on social media is an inescapable party of the small business ecosystem in the modern world. Going forward into 2023, we are going to make a conscious effort to be more active on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and video platforms like TikTok and Youtube. We can't promise we'll be good at it, but we will try. We will also make an attempt to keep this blog more up to date on the projects our team is working on because, let's be honest, these long periods of silence don't exactly make us look busy. But we are busy. Promise.
3. Expanding our Horizons
Our primary focus will always be on Americana and American content. However, going into the new year, we are excited to expand the scope of the publications we produce and release. In particular, we are flirting with adding fiction books to our publications that fit with our Americana interests. We don't want to write checks that our staff can't cash but we have some projects in the early stages and are excited to see where this year leads in terms of expanding our publication scope.
4. Expanding our Team
One of the consistent goals embedded in American Wayfarer was the hope to provide an avenue for new writers to contribute to the ongoing discussion of America as an entity. Many voices make for a beautiful choir, after all, and while we can't pay much, we are going to try and make that dream a reality an open up our company to submissions from the community. If you have anything you think would fit the bill, keep an eye on this blog heading into the summer and maybe you can send us a copy for publication in upcoming projects. That's all for now.
Thank you all.
And Happy New Year!
-- The American Wayfarer Team
Comments