My friend, Cesar, and I started an underground humor & literary magazine in San Diego. We, with the help of a handful of others, created, designed, marketed, distributed, and generated revenue for what was slowly becoming a successful and sought-after publication. An old family friend got a hold of the magazine and promised us the world: He wanted to take over the responsibility of all distribution, sales, and costs involved in bringing the magazine to Indianapolis. While we were only producing 20,000 issues every other month in San Diego, this guy was going to pay us to create a monthly magazine and print 50,000 issues a pop. We opted to discontinue our run in San Diego to focus on making the magazine more consumer-friendly for our launch in Indianapolis. We established a writing and web team, as well as streamlined our production plan in order to make this magazine competitive with current Indianapolis publications.
Cesar and I were working at bars while trying to make all of this happen. So, the thought of quitting, moving to New York City (where we planned to run our side of production—the creative side, that is) and working for ourselves was too good to be true. Literally. For, as the cliché goes, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Everything fell through two months before our proposed launch. The following will cover what we have done to cope, how it affected us, and life after the magazine we spent two years creating.
Let’s take a moment to make a toast to catharsis, shall we? Cheers.
A very detailed account of the magazine's making can be found here.
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