I’ve mentioned a number of times that we have some really cool plans for Raging Chicken Press in 2012. Since we will not publish another full issue until the first week of February, I want to use this down-time to share with you some of our plans. I won’t try to lay out all the things we want to do in a single post. Rather, every few days I’ll share one or two things we are working on.
In this post: Best of Raging Chicken Press, 2011
Beginning in July 2012, Raging Chicken Press will publish an annual “Best of” collection. December marked our sixth issue and we figured it made sense to stick with the calendar year for the collection–not to mention the fact that it will be much more manageable to work with only half a year for our first crack at publishing this collection. We hope to run a limited number of paperback copies as well as making the book available as an e-book. At this point, our intention is to license the collection under the same Creative Commons “share alike” license with which our web page is licensed.
Beginning with the February issue we will be asking readers to weigh in with nominations for the “best of” collection. If you’ve been with us since the first issue or if you just recently came across our site, we’d encourage you to browse through our archives and begin thinking about which articles you would want to see in Best of Raging Chicken Press, 2011. By February we should have a good idea about how much this project will run us and which local, union printer can work with us. Ideally, we’ll have all the final selections together by March or April and will be shooting for a July publication date–just in time to celebrate our first birthday!
Assuming that we’ll be able to establish a good working relationship with a local union printer, we hope that Best of Raging Chicken Press, 2011 will not only inaugurate our Best of series, but will be the book that launches a branch of Raging Chicken Press devoted to publishing works by activists, agitators, and assorted rabble-rousers. That’s right, a small, activist publishing house. How soon we’ll actually be able to launch our publishing wing will depend quite a bit on our fundraising efforts in early 2012, so I’m keeping the publishing house in pencil at this point.
And, yes, you will be hearing a lot about fundraising in early 2012. Raging Chicken Press will be making a big push on Kickstarter in early 2012 in the hopes of establishing Raging Chicken Press as a sustainable, independent, progressive media site. It’s become pretty clear, pretty quickly that we are going to need some start-up funds in order to get many of our new projects off the ground. For example, while we expect the Best of Raging Chicken Press series to become relatively self-sustaining, the up-front money to get the book off the ground is something that most of us working on RCP don’t have lying around in our bank accounts. Our goal is to avoid, as much as possible, relying upon advertising to fund RCP and our new projects. We are taking a page out of the podcasting world here and will be turning to our readers and the progressive community to help invest in building an independent, progressive media infrastructure. We know it’s possible–at least it’s been quite successful in the podcasting world. So, we’re going to give it a whirl.
Anyway, from all of us at Raging Chicken Press, we wish you and yours a wonderful holiday season and a Happy New Year! Thanks for all of your support and encouragement.
Bread and Roses,
Kevin Mahoney
Editor Zero
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