Archive for December, 2025

h1

In-Depth Conversation With Roger Black: From AMERIKA To Big Bend Sentinel… The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With A Genius Art Director

December 18, 2025

 “This is a hard time to start a magazine. The country shaking like an old drunk. Who knows he has to give up the hoosh. Does not provide a climate of reason and ease that magazines thrive on. There is a recession.Magazines are collapsing left and right,” wrote Roger Black in his role as Editor of a magazine called AMERIKA in 1970.

Mr. Black was a student at the University of Chicago and editor of the students’ newspaper, The Maroon.  AMERIKA was forced to change its name after the dummy issue was published and the first and only issue published was called PRINT PROJECT AMERIKA.

I reached out to Mr. Black to talk about the story of AMERIKA and to get an update on what he is up to these days.  He told me that he’s “back actually doing a publication. And this is an urgent time for magazines and newspapers. We must find a way of keeping them going, keeping them independent.”

In fact, Roger Black wrote this week on his Facebook page under the heading “ROGER BLACK’S FAREWELL TOUR?” Join me at Big Bend Sentinel, where a team of innovative journalists is redefining local news.  We’re testing two old ideas. In the video (that accompanied the post) watch for the key words: “fact” and “art.”

Mr. Black continued, “I started this tour in 1973 as art director of LA (1973). Now, as acting Art Director and non-profit chair, I’m back to weekly newspapers! The real work is done by a small energetic band of editors led by Rob D’Amico, Sam Karas, Mary Etherington, and Ariele Gentiles.”

He adds, “Can weekly newspapers survive and flourish? Can we hold onto local journalism?” 

I reached out to Mr. Black to ask him about his original work on newspapers and magazines. I was mainly interested in the very first magazine, “AMERIKA” he edited while still a student at the university.  Needless to say, he is a wealth of information and he has left his thumb print on many national and regional publication throughout his career.  I hope you will enjoy this lightly edited conversation with a person who for years I called “a genius creative art director.”

Samir Husni:  You ask Chat GPT about Roger Black and it tells you, “Very influential in magazine and newspaper design,”  but no mention that you were an editor of a magazine back in 1970 while you were still a student at the University of Chicago.

Roger Black: Yes.

Samir Husni: And the magazine was called America with a K: AMERIKA

Roger Black: Well, that was the dummy. Later, it was PRINT PROJECT AMERIKA. There were only the dummy issue and the one and only first issue.

Samir Husni: So, tell me about your journey with AMERIKA.

Roger Black: AMERIKA was envisioned as Parade magazine (The Sunday newspaper supplement) for student newspapers.

In 1968, I was the editor of the Maroon, the student paper of the college at the University of Chicago. I must tell you, that was a very good year to be a student editor. And particularly in Chicago.

We had a lot of news. It was a big time for change. We started putting out a weekly magazine called Gray City Journal, which ultimately became its own publication.

So we started thinking that many student papers don’t have that kind of content. Harvard, Yale, and other elite schools do.

But in terms of magazine style, both entertainment and serious stuff, photojournalism and drawings, they didn’t really exist. If you go back and look at the 1960s’ student newspapers they were pretty dry.

A guy in the business school at the university, named Mark Brawerman, who is from California, came up with the idea.

A very sharp guy who just started school. He didn’t really have any business experience.

He thought that we could do this. One of the things that he did, and with my involvement, I thought it was a good idea, too, he started writing all the student newspaper editors and publishers saying, we have this idea.

Would you be interested in taking it? And we’re going to print a prototype, and you can decide. That was the reason for the prototype; we had to get the circulation.

I was interested in design. I had started doing some publication work before I got to college. I had a wonderful teacher named Robert Gothard, a famous typographer, who did student, alumni magazines, and other publications for universities and colleges and did other things, too. He was a great designer.

So, I got interested. He was the first art director of Print magazine, for example. I was really interested in magazines from really as a young kid. My mother worked for magazines.

We had written all these people, and we got enough responses that if we could print 200,000, we could have distributed them.

So I started working on the prototype. And it’s funny because my girlfriend at the time is listed as the art director. I don’t even remember her name now.

There you go. The prototype cover came from Kent State. It was from an art student there who did this kind of Andy Warhol homage after the Kent State shooting. And there’s more stuff of that inside. Anyway, I thought I could be a designer.

I looked at a lot of magazines. How hard can it be? So, I did this issue, this prototype. And by some wild set of coincidences, Sam Antupit, who is a great art director, the art director of Esquire at that time.

George Lewis did the covers, but he did the inside. And it was beautiful. He was doing a special issue of Print Magazine about magazines.

And he put this in a box called Hopeful Upstarts. We realized we were going to leave Chicago and move operation to New York. So, I got to New York and I looked him up.

And we had gotten some funding. We were starting to sell ads. But I couldn’t find an art director.

That was the funny thing. There weren’t a lot of people, if you think about it, Rolling Stone and New York Magazine only started in 1967. And before that, there were art directors at Esquire or at Town and Country or the fashion magazines, and Holiday magazine.

There were certain kind of visual magazines that had art directors. But National Geographic didn’t have an art director. Life Magazine didn’t have an art director.

It was not really one of those job descriptions that people, their mom said, you can be an art director. No one, no one really was thinking about that. And I couldn’t find any.

But Sam had this fantastic studio on, I’m going to say, East 52nd Street in a brownstone building. Later, the previous Citicorp Village was built there. But he was doing a bunch of different magazines out of the studio or doing designs, and redesigns.

He had a famous magazine artist, Richard Hess, who was his partner in that. So, it was called Hess and Antupit.

It was the name of the studio. And they were on the top floor. I was totally blown away how great it all was.

He did have student aides from SVA or Pratt or Cooper Union students working part time or as interns for him. What he couldn’t really recommend any other kids to be art directors. I finally came back and asked him if he would do it.

And by some miracle he said yes. And agreed to our price, which included all the type setting, all the illustrations and photos, the whole art project. He said he would do it for a fixed price.

I probably lost my shirt on it. He took over in that first real estate number one. It was really the designer’s Hess and Antupit.

I got to be the editor. So that was fun.

Samir Husni:  The dummy issue was called AMERIKA, and the first issue PRINT PROJECT AMERIKA, why did you change the name?

Roger Black: I’ll tell you the story why we changed the name.

We got a letter from the Catholic Church. They sent us an official letter saying that they have a magazine called America and we have the trademark, so you can’t use America even with changing the C to a K.

Of course, I knew even at age 20 that you can’t trademark a place name. You can’t put a trademark on America. So I wrote back saying, you can’t trademark a place name.

So, I’m ignoring their letter. They wrote back and said, well, how many lawyers do you have? Basically, I said, these people are going to give us a hard time. I’m going to just add a qualifier.

We added the phrase PRINT PROJECT AMERIKA.  We made it more experimental, new media feeling.

Samir Husni: The State Department didn’t send you a letter saying we have a magazine aimed to the Soviet Union called America.

Roger Black: Well, their magazine was only circulating in Russia. And we weren’t going to Russia. They are not allowed to distribute it here.

Samir Husni: In this digital age, where do you see print role?

Roger Black: Print magazines had a very good run. I like to say it was a hundred-year run. If you look at the magazines, like the late 19th century, magazines that started running art, photo engraving had come in.

They were impressive. And then you had with the invention, of rotary presses and linotype typesetting and all that. Magazines followed the newspapers in increasing press runs.

So you had the concept of mass magazines. That whole business model kept morphing. Everyone forgets about this, you know, like in 1995, the commercial web appeared and everybody said, oh, everything’s over.

But I don’t think the commercial web was much more of a kick in the head than the television. And before that, there was a similar abrupt change with radio. The idea that entertainment could just sit in your chair and not have to think and just listen.

Magazines like The Saturday Evening Post were really hurt by that. Because that was their position, at home after they were reading entertaining stuff. But they survived and they adapted.

I think that the biggest challenge for a contemporary magazine, and that also includes online, is the attention span problem and the way that the kind of addiction to the constant scroll, just going vertically with dozens of different things that you’re barely aware of what it is. You stop on a cat or whatever you want to look at.

That has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. We didn’t even know about TikTok 10 years ago. And Facebook seems for people my age now.

All that keeps morphing. Instagram had its moment in the sun. And everything, everything is always moving. My feeling is that print offers a new kind of respite for that.

In the way that radio seemed like a respite for reading. Print, going back to reading, is a relief from that addictive scrolling that everyone’s doing. Or just that very short attention span, you look at one thing, you look at another thing, you look at another thing.

That kind of short attention span gets tiresome after a while.  And why can’t I say that with any confidence? It’s because the long form media, like books or movies, are blasting ahead fun. I mean, movie says, the movie, the Hollywood studio business is once again in convulsions. With every year, there’s a headline that says, Hollywood is no longer the same. It will never be the same.

We don’t recognize it anymore. And they’ve been saying that since about 1920 since talkies came in. So that long form sitting in a movie theater or watching it on Netflix is a very compelling experience.

And people enjoy it. It’s still, there is a business model in the same way that music kind of changes business model from the time of the record business. Movies are too, but also books.

It’s very interesting to me to see things like the eBooks for the digital side, but also bookstores are coming back. There are new bookstores everywhere. And there are very niche bookstores.

Bookstores about cooking or bookstores about architecture. All over the place. It’s fairly like Marfa, Texas, where I am right now, it’s just a few thousand people, right? It has an extremely good bookstore that also has a quite a good art collection.

Now, Marfa may be a special town, they just finished a new library or a big addition to this little library in Marathon, Texas. Population 400. And every time I’ve been by it, it’s full.

A lot of kids. Why is that? Because there’s something very pleasant about holding a book and reading it. And getting it, one of the advantages that books have and movies have over the endless internet is that you finish the book.

I’ve read the magazine. I’m done. I finished The New Yorker.

Almost nobody can say that online. There is a real feeling of accomplishment. And of course, The New Yorker’s secret that Howard Gossage, the advertising man, pointed out when he was doing their advertising.

The cartoons in The New Yorker are the guilt reliever. Because you can go, page all the way through, get a few chuckles. You might read a talk piece or one or two other things.

And then you sit the magazine down and somebody says, and you mentioned something that you saw in The New Yorker.  I read it in The New Yorker. I read The New Yorker every week.

That’s a definite feeling of accomplishment. From a psychological point of view, there is satisfaction that comes from the phenomenon of the edition. This is a magazine.

This is the September issue of our magazine. Or this week’s magazine. Whatever.

And the same thing. You get to feel like you finished it. You go through it.

The online newspapers, you never finish. The digital crowd is very surprised that people like the PDF replicas of newspapers. Like The Dallas Morning News now presents that first.

If you go to their website, you get the replica first. Then you get the actual website. Because people know how that navigates.

They know where their stuff is. Everything’s in a familiar place. And things like PressReader made it increasingly easy to read on different devices.

The feeling about sessions, session time, completing an edition, very important. I think that magazines, in the same way that I think anthology, television like 60 Minutes will go on despite everything else. Now we still must work on the business model.

The numbers are much smaller than they used to be. We’re not doing mass magazine. But I think that quite a few people, we see people getting in and surviving.

And it’s delightful.

Samir Husni: Mr. Black, if someone comes to you and says, I want to start a new magazine, what do you tell them?

Roger Black: I really ask them, who’s your reader? I think it all starts with the reader.

Who is it you’re trying to talk to? Have you talked to them? You communicate with them. And I think that’s the way that we all got in the media have gotten in trouble over the years, is that we think that we’re the media. And it’s a two-way thing.

Reading is interactive. And I continue to find, maybe it’s because of my extreme age, I find reading the most effective kind of communication. It’s faster, it’s cheaper, and it’s inexpensive, as opposed to a video that you do on TikTok or YouTube.

That’s an effort. It’s a production. Maybe we don’t have a TV station like we used to.

And we’re relying a lot on Apple and the others to fix our video for us. But I think that having a group of people just writing, taking pictures and putting them together into a magazine, is very low cost compared to what the big guys are trying to do. And I think you can, if you make it good.

If you connect with the reader, it can work. And it doesn’t have to be high art. It doesn’t have to be the kind of level of journalism you’d expect in The New York Times or something else.

But if it can be good and readable, and is hitting a chord that people like, I think you can make it. One example you mentioned, Arena, the Santa Fe magazine, which is two old, French, encrusted print guys. One, John Miller, worked with me.

Owen Lipstein, somewhat controversial publisher from New York, who was the publisher of Smart Magazine, which I did in the late 90s with Terry McDonnell, only 13 issues ever published. Anyway, they got the idea of doing a big fat real estate magazine in Santa Fe, which of course, people in Marfa would say that Santa Fe is a real concoction of the real estate salespeople, which it may or may not be. But what they did to get the content, because they didn’t have a huge budget, and none of this stuff, no one is paying what Vanity Fair is paying.

I don’t think even Vanity Fair’s paying what they used to pay. But what John Miller, the editor there, and designer, did was to just do a lot of interviews. He had video, and some of the interviews were trimmed to just be the answers.

It was like a first-person article. Sometimes they would have a lot of pictures of their home, or they would go there. Sometimes it was just pick up what they could provide, the decorator, the designers, pictures of the house or whatever, or their potters, and they had stuff on their website.

Just thinking about it carefully and making it interesting with interesting people.

Basically, it’s all about the people in magazines. So you start with the reader, but then you give them stories about people to read.

That’s basically the core of every good magazine.

Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical two last questions, is there any question I failed to ask you you’d like me to ask?

Roger Black: I sort of expected you to say, why are you still doing this? Which is funny, I don’t know what else I would do. It’s like somebody says, why do you have this place in Texas out in the desert? And my answer is, I can’t think of anything, any other place I’d rather be.

I can’t think of anything else I would rather do than try to work with typography. We have Type Network, I’m chairman of Type Network, and we’re doing a wonderful collaboration with 100, more than 100 type designers and type founders with special custom design projects. Some of it is consulting, and some of it is type design.

I’m not a type designer, but I can connect them to the market. It’s a very small operation, but quite fun. I want to keep working.

My father worked till he was 80. And then, even later, he said, I never should have quit. So, the next question is, what are you doing now? As well as Type Network, I’ve come out to Marfa, and I’ve taken over by starting a new non-profit with Don Gardner from Austin, and Gonzalo Garcia Bautista from Mexico City.

We have started a non-profit, and we are now publishing this paper, which you can go to at BigBenSentinel.com. You can join and get the PDF, or we’ll mail it to you. For 60 bucks, we’ll mail it to you.

Folks, that price is going up, so act now.

Samir Husni: If I come unannounced to your house…

Roger Black: In Marfa, now? Well, it’s a marathon.  I also hang out in Florida. We’re still repairing from the hurricane last year.

And I have an apartment with my husband in Oslo, Norway. So, I kind of am nicely balanced.

Samir Husni: So, if I come unannounced one evening, what do I catch Roger Black doing to rewind from a busy day?

Roger Black: Reading. I’m still old-fashioned.

Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night?

Roger Black: I don’t stay up at night. I am a great sleeper.

I don’t know why. I go to bed early. I go to bed by 11 or so.

In the old days, I’d stay up late. My peace of mind results from, as you get older, you realize you must let things go and become balanced, or you’re always anxious. The other thing that helps me, has helped me in my whole life, is I have a colossally developed ego.

It doesn’t occur to me until years later that I could be wrong. It’s like later people point out, that was a complete disaster. And I say you’re right.

I was completely unaware of that at the time. And I still, you know, it’s like I tried to do that thing, Screensaver, I thought we could do a technology solution for reading digitally. And it turned out that it didn’t work beautifully.

It turned out that the publishers didn’t have a business model for that. So, I do find myself waking up sometimes and thinking about those things. But I go right back to sleep.

I’m not what you’d call a troubled old man.

Samir Husni: Thank you. Take care. Have a great day.

Posted in A Launch Story..., From the Vault, Innovation in print, Inside the Great Minds of Magazine Makers, Magazine Power, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »

h1

Make It Free: A New Approach To Paywalls. The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With CEO Wade Bradley.

December 10, 2025

If you are one of the more than 90% of people who exit the second you see a paywall on an article you want to read, fret no more.  There is a new approach to paywalls which allows you to enjoy free content on your favorite publisher’s website in return to accept to receive four promotional emails from the creator of this new platform:  Make It Free.

I reached out to Mr. Wade Bradley, CEO of Make It Free and had this engaging conversation to learn more about Make It Free and how it works for both the readers and publishers:

Samir Husni: My first question to you is, give me the elevator pitch of what’s Make It Free.

Wade Bradley: The elevator pitch is pretty simple. We enable consumers to enjoy free content on a publisher site while we pay the publisher.

So instead of publishers turning away 98% of their traffic that hit the paywall and immediately exit, they can now monetize that 98%.

Samir Husni: Give me the background. What makes you come up with this idea? Why do you want to help publishers?

Wade Bradley: Well, initially we had developed the concept for streaming. We utilized it to eliminate ads on free streaming sites.  Instead of seeing ads, they would receive four emails. We then realized there was a much more larger market domestically and globally.

Utilizing that technology and utilizing our patents in that technology on publisher paywalls.

Samir Husni: Can you guide me if I’m a publisher and I want to use your Make It Free, how does that work?

Wade Bradley: You sign up a contract and the contract is one year, but you stop it at any point with a 30-day notice.

At the end of the day, we bring in our specialized support team. They work directly with the publisher to put the code and the API (Application Programming Interface) onto their publisher paywall.

Samir Husni: You said that if I want to click on Make It Free, I have to give my email and accept to receive four emails from you.  What do you think will make the consumer give you his or her email if they are not willing to give it to the publisher?

Wade Bradley: Well, what we found with publishers and really all consumer product companies, is that if they give the email, there is a relentless approach to market to them. So on our modal, we state very clearly, read article for free. We will send you four branded emails.

You earn a reward coin for each email opened. So we incentivize the opening of the email, not the clicking. And we never sell your data.

I think that’s the key point. Because what we’ve seen is about 10% of people currently click our button that’s on the paywall. And it says read article free with Make It Free.

Then we get a 32% conversion on average. That is essentially because we’re telling them upfront, you’re going to get four emails.

So really a simplified process.

Samir Husni: Are you now fully operating with this model or you’re still in the testing stages?

Wade Bradley: No, we have publishers signed up. We have 16 months of data that proves out the 32% conversion.

And certainly what we’ve seen is that it varies based on geography, etc. But also based on putting it on the front end of your paywall. Meaning don’t give people five articles and have the paywall come up at the sixth.

People that are getting the best results are the groups that are doing it as a hard paywall or a semi-porous paywall. Maybe one, maybe two articles for free each month.

Samir Husni: I’m assuming that it’s available for newspapers, magazines.

Wade Bradley: Yes.

Samir Husni: Do you differentiate between a newspaper like, let’s say, The New York Times or a local newspaper, and magazines, whether it’s big or small? Do publishers get the same $0.10 per article regardless of the size or there’s a scale based on how big or small is the paper?

Wade Bradley: No, we don’t scale it based on the size of the paper. Because at the end of the day, each provides a valuable consumer.

Samir Husni: You said you’ve been at it for 18 months and you have data for 16 months. Has it been a walk in a rose garden or you had some challenges and how you were able to overcome them?

Wade Bradley: Within which aspect? Within the industry, we started with news publishers and they get it.

It took us a while to get the messaging exact because a lot of groups thought their current paywall system would take care of this problem. The current paywall system actually created the problem. So when you have 100% of traffic being presented a paywall and 98% leave.

If they don’t click on the paywall, none of those algorithms and other neat things can be deployed. So what we realized is that we’re the front end of a paywall. The current paywall system is the backend.

And the backend attracts the people that have intention. I  want to get Fortune or Forbes, and I’m either going to register or pay. But the bulk of people and research has shown 90 to 95% at a minimum immediately exit when they see the paywall.

That’s where our system comes into play. Because instead of exiting, they’ve got another option. Read article free with Make It Free.

Samir Husni: You said your conversion rate based on those 16 months is 34%.

Wade Bradley: Approximately 10% of people that click the button on the paywall currently  32% return.  And it varies.

We had a group tested against sports. Only sports. It hit between 50 and 70%.

It’s much lower traffic, but the conversion rate is extremely high. We think magazines will excel because you have extremely important, lengthy  narrative, much more detailed than maybe a general newspaper would provide.

We expect to see uniquely  different numbers than what we’re currently seeing on average in the news.

Samir Husni: Do you have data on how many magazines offer paywalls?

Wade Bradley: It’s probably about 80%, if not more, conservatively. A paywall is a necessary element.

When everyone switched to digital, they thought this is Nirvana. We’re going to reach millions more people than we ever could reach. And we don’t have to print it.

But the ad rates are dramatically different than print advertising. When they started to realize how many more millions of people they had to have to be able to make up for the print value, it didn’t work. And that’s why paywalls came into being.

They solved one problem. But they really caused another that’s quite significant that we solve with Make It Free.

Samir Husni: Can you think of a question that I should ask you, but I did not ask you?

Wade Bradley: It’s pretty easy integration.

It usually only takes a couple of weeks to get it set up on a paywall. Then the first 45 days we’re conducting detailed analysis to which brands to match to those particular consumers.

After 45 days of analysis, publishers start earning daily revenue.

Samir Husni: I always conclude my interviews with two personal questions. If I come uninvited to your home one evening, what do I catch Wade doing? Cooking, having a glass of wine, watching TV, reading a magazine or hitting Make It Free?

Wade Bradley: Well, at the end of the day, what Wade’s doing, Wade’s constantly working. Wade doesn’t drink, which is part of the California lifestyle.

At the end of the day, we’re continually working and adjusting what we can do to best benefit publishers.

Because as we benefit publishers, we benefit consumers. And both of those things benefit brands. Brands want this consumer.

These are very literate consumers. They’re excellent consumers. It’s an opportunity where a publisher can be able to now monetize that traffic they’ve been turning away and condition them to become a subscriber. There’s kind of a process leading up to that.

That’s what Make It Free allows them to do. They start gaining the engagement and trust of the consumer. Then the consumer quickly realizes, wow, I really like this magazine.

I’m continually coming here. I’m coming 10, 20 times a month. I should subscribe.

We send out a free quarterly newsletter or subscription offer to the the community using our service on their site. Because we want them to gain that 1st party data for the consumer. You simply must do it at the right time.

Up front in your face, here’s a paywall is not the right time.

Samir Husni: How many times they can hit the Make It Free?

Wade Bradley: As many times as they would like to read another article. So every single time they want to read another article, they hit Make It Free.

It’s a universal signup. So if they’ve signed up elsewhere and now come to a publication that has Make It Free, all they have to do is click agree and accept. They don’t sign up in each publication.

It’s universal. It’s really simple for the consumer. And as this becomes more pervasive across America, we think that the initial clicks are going to increase.

We see that on average, 4.2 times per month, the consumer returns and uses it again. With more city-centric news publications that just have a lot more news going on, or highly specific publications in financial technology, etc., that consumer is going to come more often.

Samir Husni: My typical last question is what keeps Wade up at night?

Wade Bradley: A lot of things keep Wade up at night.

Regarding the business, you know, we’ve gotten to the point where we already have now approximately 180 publications in our queue to integrate. That’s moving at a very quick pace. That’s one of the areas we’re highly focused on.

We’ve got our brand sales teams that are going to brands, and brands absolutely love this because they have a halo effect. They’re the ones providing the article for free. So on the  modal, when they sign up, they’ll see the brand.

And then the consumers will receive the offers from that brand. For brands, they’re getting for the first time ever an unduplicated, positive-minded consumer.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

Posted in News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »

h1

The Fabulist:  A New Speculative Literature Magazine With A Print First Business Model. The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Josh Wilson, Editor & Publisher

December 1, 2025

Born from the womb of the web, The Fabulist launches its first print issue in 2026 after being a web only platform since 2007.  To quote Josh Wilson, the magazine’s editor and publisher, in his letter to the readers accompanying issue zero of the magazine, “In a world that’s glutted with disposable digital ephemera, we love working with print: It is a tactile, tangible, dynamic, and long-lasting medium that transforms your experience as a reader, and celebrates the meaning and value of the works we publish.”

Issue zero of The Fabulist, art by Glenn Buack

And Mr. Magazine™ can’t but 100% agree with Mr. Wilson.  There is no better place to combine “amazing stories, rich illustrations, and wild art,” than print.  The Fabulist publishers believe so much in print that they make their business model print first.

Intrigued by the concept and the business plan, I reached out to Mr. Wilson to ask him more about the inception of The Fabulist, the plans and the reason for the print magazine after being a web only platform.  We had a lovely conversation and learned the secrets behind the transformation from digital to print.

So, without any further ado, please join me in this lovely conversation with Josh Wilson, editor and publisher of The Fabulist.

But first, the soundbites:

Josh Wilson, editor and publisher, The Fabulist

On the reason for print: “I realized that print really was something people were attracted to and aspired to be a part of.”

On the background history of The Fabulist: “For several years we printed chapbooks, short 20, 30, 40, 50 pages, saddle stitched, single story publications. Then we began to think through our model and what we could do with it, which brought us around to this print magazine. I’m surprised to see that it’s really gaining traction.”

On his background: “I started out in print in the 1993 – 1995 period. I’m a journalist who worked at SF Gate in San Francisco and never went back to print until now. And it’s been a pleasure. I’m also amazed to find that readers and writers and everybody else is thrilled to see print happening.”

On The Fabulist elevator pitch: “We’re a literary, a speculative literature magazine. We publish fantasy and science fiction.”

On the business model: “I find that digital monetization is very, very hard, and it’s amazing to me that print from the previous millennium, the previous century, turns out to be a viable business model.”

On the zero issue: “It is a viable standalone issue. But we wanted to just see what we could do with print.”

On the art of curation in print: “There are space considerations in print, which makes the curation process more interesting. What order do the stories go in? What’s the effect of reading them in order? Each piece of art and its positioning, the layout.”

More on the art of curation in print: “I find it a much more interesting and creative medium to curate for that the constraints produce innovation and fun. Whereas on the Internet, every page is the same. It’s a template.”

On the future: “We want to continue to develop work in print and on the web. But we want to lead with print as a beautiful standalone document.”

On what keeps him up at night: “Worrying about the magazine and its success. There’s always something to worry about.”

The first issue of The Fabulist, art by Sergiu Grapa.

To learn more about The Fabulist or to order a subscription please click here.

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Josh Wilson, editor and publisher, The Fabulist:

Samir Husni: First, congratulations on the new magazine.

Josh Willson: Thank you.

Samir Husni: Anybody that launches a print magazine today deserves to be congratulated.

Josh Wilson: Thank you.

Samir Husni: Tell me, what’s the story of The Fabulist?

Josh Wilson: The story of The Fabulist

Well, way back in 2007, I kept getting my stories declined by magazines, and I decided to start a little blog, just a website where I could put my stories and those of my friends. About six months later, we began getting submissions, which was very strange because I never posted a submissions link.

People would just email us their stories. It turned out that we had been listed in a writer’s market called Duotrope. I don’t know who put us there, but we ended up in this writer’s market, and the submissions have been coming constantly since then, far more than we can deal with, and usually better than my own stories.

I took down all my stories and, for a long time, posted new work whenever we could get around to it. I would say about the mid-teens, 2015, 2016, 2017, we were at a reading event in San Francisco, where we live. I was approached by Elizabeth Gonzales James, who went on to become a novelist. She has two novels out, The Bullet Swallower and Mona at Sea. The Bullet Swallower is being developed for a feature film. She approached me before her first book contract and said, Do I need any help?

I remember being overwhelmed by submissions. I said, I could really use a hand managing all the submissions. She read a gigantic backlog of hundreds of submissions and said, You could do a story a week. Why don’t you?

I said, OK. We went with that. At that point, I realized we really should have a contract.

I contacted other publishers I know and asked them for advice. We made a writer contract. There are a few other steps to this.

One is that I realized there is a big difference between genre and literary journals. We were kind of in both places. The literary journals, you often pay a reading fee and don’t get paid for your work, to the extent that I would send a submission’s call to creative writing and MFA programs and get the department chairs sending me their work for this blog.

But the genre magazines, Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, Asimov’s magazine, these all came out of the pulp era. There was a very strong writer’s advocacy movement. A lot of that business was pretty fast and loose. In the genre world, you don’t pay reading fees. You always pay the writers.

We decided we should at least do an honorarium. We grew that from $25 to $100 per story. Still operating at a loss. All digitally.

Finally, the final chapter for this evolution, in 2023, in the depths of the COVID pandemic, we were, I guess at the end of the worst of it. A colleague of mine here in San Francisco, Jennifer Joseph from Manic D Press, a great local imprint that has their work collected in the Library of Congress, their LGBTQ work, said that she’s going to AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. This was in Seattle.

Did I want to share a table, an exhibitor table at the book fair? I thought, yes, why not? I did that rashly because I didn’t have anything to sell because it was all digital, but I realized the contract that we had been using enabled us to make books. So I got an $80 color printer and began making chapbooks. And my colleague, our art director, Adam Myers, is a gentleman of very high production values.

We produced some beautiful books and they sold. They almost sold out. And I realized that print really was something people were attracted to and aspired to be a part of.

For several years we printed chapbooks, short 20, 30, 40, 50 pages, saddle stitched, single story publications. Then we began to think through our model and what we could do with it, which brought us around to this print magazine. I’m surprised to see that it’s really gaining traction.

This is after months of agonizing and product development. We got a small grant from CLMP, Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, to hire a digital marketing specialist. Lots of thoughts about how to convert from a weekly digital blog to an issue-based periodical.

I started out in print in the 1993 – 1995 period. I’m a journalist who worked at SF Gate in San Francisco and never went back to print until now. And it’s been a pleasure. I’m also amazed to find that readers and writers and everybody else is thrilled to see print happening.

So that’s where we are. I guess that’s a little bit of a long intro.

Samir Husni: In 2025, it looks like a lot of independent publishers, like yourself, are rediscovering print and bringing print magazines to the market.You were born from the digital womb, bringing The Fabulist to print. Tell me, if you are going to give an elevator pitch about what The Fabulist is, what would you tell people?

Josh Wilson: My elevator pitch for The Fabulist is that we’re a literary, a speculative literature magazine. We publish fantasy and science fiction.

But with a literary bent, a magic realist bent, there’s a lot of interest in what’s been called new weird and new fabulism. And we feel that there’s a lot of terrain that is undeveloped for speculative fiction and speculative literature, poetry and art that doesn’t quite fit in genre. Genre has a lot of straight expectations.

We feel that there’s a lot more room to develop this stuff, that we don’t want to be constrained by the expectations of the market, that certainly there’s no limit to the work being produced — the fantastical work that’s not realist fiction, that’s not straight genre, that sometimes sits in between. And it needs a place, a beautiful home. We tried to develop that beautiful home on the Internet, and it worked.

We have a brand. We’re an established presence. But we didn’t have a business model.

I find that digital monetization is very, very hard, and it’s amazing to me that print from the previous millennium, the previous century, turns out to be a viable business model. I guess that’s longer than an elevator pitch.

Samir Husni: It’s a very tall building.

Josh Wilson: Yes. We’re on the way up.

Samir Husni: Your business model is based on giving subscribers, a free complimentary zero issue or a dummy copy. So what’s the idea behind this business model, giving the one issue free for people who subscribe and then billing them technically per issue?

Josh Wilson: Yes. Two reasons.

First, the per issue billing was something I observed and we observed in Patreon. It’s a creator’s platform. It’s like Kickstarter, but you make your contributions serially over time. And musicians and artists and so on use it and every month you pay $2 or $10 or whatever and you get a new song or a new story or a new piece of art. So, that seemed like a really viable model.

It’s been of interest in the journalism world as well, this monthly income. Rather than having it all happen at once in a cluster annually, it gives the reader a lot of flexibility to exit without having to make a full commitment. So, we decided, we tried a Patreon account and it did work, but we get double hit with fees.

Patreon takes 3% or 5% and the credit card company takes a percent, and we really wanted to reduce that friction. So, we are selling subscriptions without Patreon. We are going with a bimonthly for now and we hope to increase to monthly. So that’s why we’re billing per issue.

And the free issue was our marketing consultant, a gentleman named Neal Gorenflo. He is a marketing guy. He started a publication himself called Shareable, Shareable.net and it covered the sharing economy when that was first coming up.

He’s a very astute and accomplished marketing person who said, you got to have a free offer. You got to have a no risk trial. And we already knew we were going to forge ahead with the print periodical and had made this issue zero.

You called it a dummy. It is a viable standalone issue. But we wanted to just see what we could do with print.

I had a whole bunch of those, you know, in a box on our shelf in our spacious corporate offices here. I thought, okay, let’s do it. Let’s use these.

I had to do another print run. We ran out. It’s been so popular.

I’m going down to San Jose to a printer a little later today to pick up another 150 copies.

Samir Husni: One of the things about print is you must do more curation than digital. As an experienced journalist, how is your curation takes place or the difference between accepting something for digital or accepting something for print?

Josh Wilson: We remain really concerned about quality control the whole way through. So, we did not and we never wanted to treat the Internet as a disposable medium where we could just throw stuff.

We always had a long review process. How will this look in our pages? How much work does the story need? It starts with whether we love it and we want to see it flourish. And if we love it, we’ll commit to it.

I would not say that we’re treating the Internet as more of an easy medium to throw stuff into.

There are space considerations in print, which makes the curation process more interesting. What order do the stories go in? What’s the effect of reading them in order? Each piece of art and its positioning, the layout.

I find it a much more interesting and creative medium to curate for, because the constraints produce innovation and fun. Whereas on the Internet, every page is the same. It’s a template.

We try to make it beautiful and we’re going to do a design refresh and get that website up to speed. But, although it is a boundless medium, it is ironically much more constrained, I think, than print. Because you can’t do an interesting layout.

For all its dynamism, it’s much harder to make it an art piece. And with this print magazine, we want to make an art piece. This is collectible.

Samir Husni: When’s your first issue coming out?

Josh Wilson: January. We had to push it back because of the two holidays, there’s no way we can get the proof back. And then everybody’s going out of state at the end of December.

So mid-January, we aim to have that out and then bi-monthly afterwards. I was just looking at the new cover and it’s great. It’s quite different, too.

Samir Husni: Is there any question I’m supposed to ask you, that I did not ask you?

Josh Wilson: I suppose you could ask me about the state of genre and literary publishing in print and online. I find that fascinating and something I’ve gone deep into over the summer, although I might talk a little bit.

Samir Husni: So tell me about the competition. Who’s out there?

Josh Wilson: The interesting thing is a realization that the folks here aren’t competing. The audience for written-text genre fiction, fantasy and science fiction mostly, and the stuff that spills out over into the literary edges of that, is substantial and undiscovered and undeveloped.

There are a lot of conventions and conferences that happen nationally and globally, science fiction and fantasy conventions and comic book and movie conventions and the ones that are game conventions. And there’s some overlap, some Venn diagram overlap, but the literary conferences are tiny. The World Science Fiction Convention, where they give out the Hugo Awards, it’s one of the highest awards in genre fiction, only gets about 8 to 10,000 attendees, whereas Comic Con in San Diego or Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia gets tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of attendees.

These people do read books, maybe not a full percentage of them. But a lot of people are genre fans without ever knowing that they’re genre readers. They watch movies, they watch TV, they love Star Trek, they love Star Wars. They’ll follow the movies and the characters.

The same is true in the literary world. When I was at AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Conferences conference in LA, we covered all our expenses, including travel and conference registration and housing.  We covered all our costs.

A lot of it was these young MFAs walking up to our table and realizing that they could do genre, that they weren’t stuck in a realist, forgive the term, a realist ghetto. There was a lot of room for them to follow their interest and desires.

We broadly feel that the audience is vast and undeveloped. And there isn’t a national, there aren’t national scale, mass media scale consumer magazines. They’re more literary journals.

So, we’re all working together. And there’s a lot of great ones. Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, Analog are all the warhorses from the pulp era.

There’s a host of amazing online magazines that sometimes have print as well. Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare magazine, Strange Horizons, and Uncanny magazine are really sort of among the top tier of these online magazines that do issues in e-books. And sometimes audio books as well.

But also release all the stories for free on the web. So, there’s this freemium model. And then they’ll do print on demand for print.

I think we may be distinct in really going, switching hard to print first. The editor of, publisher of Clarkesworld, Neil Clarke, who’s an analyst of the industry and an accomplished publisher, pointed out that he goes where the readers are. He has an audio book version.

The people who listen to audio books are different from the ones who read online or who read e-books even. They’re all distinct. And he has a print on demand magazine.

We may be, The Fabulist, may be taking a risk on going so hard on print first. But we are at break-even. We, in about three or four weeks, we sold more than 100 subscriptions with an online ad campaign.

And it’s very interesting to realize that we have such a latent audience. We were getting one to five subscriptions every day. And the subscription drive ends tomorrow.

We’re going to assess, redesign it, redeploy it around our issue one with the new cover. The fact that you must go where the readers are is, as Neil (Clarke) says, is absolutely true. And we want to do audio books.

We can do e-books. And we want to continue to develop work in print and on the web. But we want to lead with print as a beautiful standalone document. This is a distinction.

There’s another magazine, Reckoning magazine, that also does a beautiful print document. And then eyedroppers out their content for free. I feel that that’s an exciting approach that you can do because audiences don’t overlap. Digital is a loss leader. And digital content enters social media and the Internet as a sort of promotional mechanism for your publication.

The print people who are repeatedly exposed to it, they realize they want the magazine. Although there’s a specific strategy we did. We have a landing page.

We show off all the interiors. We boast about the contributors. Try to showcase our production values.

Samir Husni: My typical last two questions. If I come uninvited to your home one evening, what do I catch Josh doing? Cooking, having a glass of wine, watching TV, reading a book?

Josh Wilson:  I’m cooking. I love to cook. I’m feeding other people. I want them all to eat, so I try to do a good job.

And I’m usually listening to an audio book while I’m cooking, because I can’t read it. Right now, I’m listening to Barbara Tuchman, the historian.

She’s got a great book called The March of Folly about governments doing stupid things over time. After dinner, ideally, everybody else cleans up and I go back to work.

Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night these days?

Josh Wilson: Worrying about the magazine and its success. There’s always something to worry about. But I have been sufficiently exhausted that I usually fall asleep quickly.

I’m reading a great book that is keeping me up. It’s a new version of The Tempest, Shakespeare’s Tempest. It’s called Kalivas by the author Nick Mamatas, who is one of our book reviewers.

And it’s in the future. And there’s been a cataclysm. And Caliban/Kalivas lives on the Farallon Islands off San Francisco.

His mother was a nanotech Sycorax. The witch was a nanotech engineer. And Prospero is a techno magnate in this post-human society who invades the island and colonizes it.

And it’s a romp. It’s a great read. That’s been keeping me up a little too late.

Samir Husni: Excellent. Thank you and good luck.

Posted in A Launch Story..., Innovation in print, Magazine Power, New Launches, News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »