YOUNG PINES

This place looks perfect, and if you know him already then I say full steam ahead there! It’d be nice to branch out a bit with the type of places we ask to stock the book. Possibly Agent Provocateur is slightly ambitious but only because I imagine that the people that work there wouldn’t have the authority to say that they can stock the zine or not. A good idea though.

I sent off for a quote for the small books today from Blurb. I got a rough quote for a full colour, 6 x 9 softcover book with around 120 pages for an initial print run of 300. I’ll have to wait a couple days apparently so we’ll wait and see.

SC xo

Ok folks thought I’d break the seal and get a post in.

Got a few things to update on so here goes:

Michael & I had a chat on Friday and we decided that the time has come to widen the net a little bit with what we’re doing about getting the word out about the book. We decided to talk to our tutors from uni to see if they’ve got any useful contacts/suggestions for us (Milos: We’ve spoken to Ian and Mike, can you think of anyone else in uni that might be worth emailing?) We’re still waiting on replies but at least the ball is rolling. I was thinking that if for some reason we can’t get the Shipping Forecast then we might at least have the space in uni to fall back on? I think uni have links with the CUC too there’s been a few exhibitions there so we could maybe go through the tutors to nab that cool space?

Event wise: I want to move along really quickly with getting this organised. I’m still 100% into getting the Shipping Forecast but we need to make sure we’re contacting the right person. I think it’s the guy that emailed Gemma about the original £500 but I’m not sure, so we need to clarify this. If it is this guy then I think I remember Gemma saying that he has other venues so we need to make a decision about if we want to tour this thing and how it’s going to happen. Personally I think we should aim for the end of September (weekend of 30th?) for the initial event as a sort of ‘launch night’, then we can go past the original deadline if it turns out we can tour with the book and the prints. Also need to figure out if we still want people to do live readings of the poems/stories? Need to contact whoever would want to do this as soon as.

Smaller book wise, we need desperately to price up smaller copies of the book. And we need to figure out if we will need to make any changes to it before we print it small, and what size it will be. I’m feeling A5 at the moment, with a soft-ish cover. What do you think? We also need to decide on a number of copies for the first print run. This feeds back into the touring thing as we’ll have to factor in extra copies to sell in those venues.

We didn’t get a stall at the Art & Craft fair unfortunately, but as I see it we’ve saved £50 and we still have the Liverpool Zine Fair (which we’ll also have to have a respectable amount of copies of the book for).

Prints: We need to either get in contact with Uni to do some screen printing or with the Bluecoat to get sessions booked to get prints made. We’ll have to decide which images from the book to make prints of, some definitely lend themselves to it more than others.

Indie Go Go: I’ve set up a draft campaign with a new gmail account for Young Pines as a whole (all ten of us) I think we need to have a massive group meeting to talk about us being one big group. I posted this on facebook, but I was thinking that the Indie Go Go should be linked directly to Mercy’s bank account that they have for us so that the money is in an easily accessed place. We can decide on an amount to go for with the campaign as well as what perks people want to give to those that donate. Once that’s set up, everyone will have the login details and will be able to do updates on the campaign page on what the money is being spent on.

About us being one big group: Between all of us we must know a web designer that will work for free or favours or someone must be able to chuck something together themselves. I was thinking that Young Pines should have an official public site that all our collective work is on (123 reg sell .co.uk domain names for £5.98 for 2 years!!) then a linked blog that we can all update under our own names with personal updates etc.

Merch: Besides prints/the small books what other merch - if any are we going for? Postcards. pin badges/ shirts etc. We need to be realistic about what we can produce in the time we have left.

Oh, and I was thinking that once the smaller books are printed and some merch is on the go that we should do a little retweet campaign on our twitter to get the word about? Retweet for a chance to win a free copy of the book/some merch?

Phew think that’s it. Sorry for the huuuuge entry. Hope this clarifies where I’m at?

Let me know what you think!

SC xo