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New Article Writers Wanted!

Gary Oswald

It was Vampire Unions that got us Vampire Weekend
Published by SLP
Gone Fishing
Pronouns
he/him
Discuss this request here.

We have some really excellent writers writing essays and there's some really good stuff currently coming out but when I originally asked for more writers two days ago we were down to five regular writers. And, as good as those guys are, that's not the widest talent pool. Everyone knows something different, the more different voices we can get the wider the base of knowledge we can cover. Also it puts a lot of pressure on those five writers to consistently come up with articles, I'd rather they'd be able to take weeks off if a family situation comes up.

Since I originally asked about this, I've had ten people show interest and 2 new articles sent to me. That's fantastic but I'm a greedy man, I always want more. Please spread this message on social media if you're willing to, let any friends who might be interested know about this platform and think if you're interested in it yourselves. There's no commitment here, if you only have one idea for an essay, just send me one essay and I'll be happy with that, you don't need to commit to hundreds of them.

A lot of you guys are incredibly knowledgeable about stuff that our current writers aren't, I'd love to see some of that knowledge shared.
 
Also if we're serious about finding new article writers, and perhaps even authors, we need to consider how to approach this in a sideways-like manner.

What genres and subgenres branch out from AH and Counter-factual History?

What if we put word out amongst popular scifi and steampunk blogs and reddit threads, for example?
 
Circulated on Sershal Meedja.

Is there an explicit point of contact in the article for people who are interested in contributing? I can't see one - can we point them to an email address etc? @Youngmarshall

Edited the article to include an email address. sealionpressblogeditor at gmail dot com.
 
hey @Youngmarshall I've got one AH fiction review written up and hopefully more to come - how do you want them sent over to you? Via the email in your last post?
 
Just want to say how utterly delighted I've been by the response. More than 15 people have got in touch with ideas and I've gone from having no articles in reserve to having eight articles loaded onto the site right now and ready to go.

Thanks to everyone. Not only have we avoided the crunch I was worried would happen, if people keep it up it looks like it might even be possible to go up to 5 or 6 articles a week which would be fantastic.
 
Just want to say how utterly delighted I've been by the response. More than 15 people have got in touch with ideas and I've gone from having no articles in reserve to having eight articles loaded onto the site right now and ready to go.

Thanks to everyone. Not only have we avoided the crunch I was worried would happen, if people keep it up it looks like it might even be possible to go up to 5 or 6 articles a week which would be fantastic.
Glad to hear it!
 
Having been an Editor in the past, I would say that my experience is that a stockpile takes forever to build up, and can disappear in the blink of an eye. I would suggest only increasing frequency when you are absolutely confident that the supply line can handle it.

It's also a relentless process on the Editor. Once you commit to a greater frequency, that automatically means you have to commit more time to doing it. You've got to check the articles to make sure they make sense. You'll probably have to edit some to convert them into house style (Editor-speak for translate into coherent English so that it makes sense). Source the pictures. And so on.

The more time you spend on the articles, the less time you have for everything else. Take on too much, and it can quickly become a chore, and that can quickly turn into resentment and burnout.

My advice would be to keep the frequency down until you're absolutely sure you can handle an increase and you're absolutely sure that you are happy with the increase in workload.
Also, I am able to keep up daily updates on Sershal Meedja anyway because we have so many articles now I can just work through the archives on the offdays (and give updates on new books and so on).
 
Having been an Editor in the past, I would say that my experience is that a stockpile takes forever to build up, and can disappear in the blink of an eye. I would suggest only increasing frequency when you are absolutely confident that the supply line can handle it.

It's also a relentless process on the Editor. Once you commit to a greater frequency, that automatically means you have to commit more time to doing it. You've got to check the articles to make sure they make sense. You'll probably have to edit some to convert them into house style (Editor-speak for translate into coherent English so that it makes sense). Source the pictures. And so on.

The more time you spend on the articles, the less time you have for everything else. Take on too much, and it can quickly become a chore, and that can quickly turn into resentment and burnout.

My advice would be to keep the frequency down until you're absolutely sure you can handle an increase and you're absolutely sure that you are happy with the increase in workload.

Very much something I'm aware of.

The flip side of that is if all the people who are showing interest now send me an article and then it doesn't appear on the website for three months because I'm only using these new essays to fill in gaps when a regular writer is unable to do one that week then maybe they don't send me a second.

This has happened with writers who sent in articles to us earlier this year and stopped checking the site by the time they actually got shown, which was months later. Which meant the series never continued. By not increasing the schedule you run the risk of squandering that enthusiasm and losing the new writers. Momentum is important in something like this.

And given that I can't work, baby sit or socialise at the moment and probably won't be able to for the next few months, there is never going to be a better time to take on extra workload. I've gained 14 hours a day.
 
Very much something I'm aware of.

The flip side of that is if all the people who are showing interest now send me an article and then it doesn't appear on the website for three months because I'm only using these new essays to fill in gaps when a regular writer is unable to do one that week then maybe they don't send me a second.

This has happened with writers who sent in articles to us earlier this year and stopped checking the site by the time they actually got shown, which was months later. Which meant the series never continued. By not increasing the schedule you run the risk of squandering that enthusiasm and losing the new writers. Momentum is important in something like this.

And given that I can't work, baby sit or socialise at the moment and probably won't be able to for the next few months, there is never going to be a better time to take on extra workload. I've gained 14 hours a day.
This had occurred to me as well. I don't mind new writers being prioritised and giving up my slot for a few weeks if necessary.
 
Very much something I'm aware of.

The flip side of that is if all the people who are showing interest now send me an article and then it doesn't appear on the website for three months because I'm only using these new essays to fill in gaps when a regular writer is unable to do one that week then maybe they don't send me a second.

This has happened with writers who sent in articles to us earlier this year and stopped checking the site by the time they actually got shown, which was months later. Which meant the series never continued. By not increasing the schedule you run the risk of squandering that enthusiasm and losing the new writers. Momentum is important in something like this.

And given that I can't work, baby sit or socialise at the moment and probably won't be able to for the next few months, there is never going to be a better time to take on extra workload. I've gained 14 hours a day.

Any articles I send in can be held in reserved or posted whenever at the discretion of yourself.
 
Speaking as a reader of the articles, not a writer, I think the current frequency is about right. If I don't read for a few days, or even a week or two, there's not too much of a backlog so I'll still at least glance at all the articles I've not yet read. If there were a new article almost every day (a la the 5 or 6 times a week which was mentioned), then that would increase the chance that I would miss one or more articles, or decide not to read it/them because there's now too many to catch up on, based on my sometimes limited time available to read. Obviously other readers will have different opinions, as everyone's situations are different, but I thought I'd put in my tuppence-worth.

(I'll also have a think about whether I could morph from being just a reader to an occasional writer, but don't hold your collective breaths please - I don't want your deaths on my conscience!)
 
Speaking as a reader of the articles, not a writer, I think the current frequency is about right. If I don't read for a few days, or even a week or two, there's not too much of a backlog so I'll still at least glance at all the articles I've not yet read. If there were a new article almost every day (a la the 5 or 6 times a week which was mentioned), then that would increase the chance that I would miss one or more articles, or decide not to read it/them because there's now too many to catch up on, based on my sometimes limited time available to read. Obviously other readers will have different opinions, as everyone's situations are different, but I thought I'd put in my tuppence-worth.

(I'll also have a think about whether I could morph from being just a reader to an occasional writer, but don't hold your collective breaths please - I don't want your deaths on my conscience!)

Interesting take and thank you for sharing it. I'll admit that viewpoint had never occurred to me if only because we only just dropped from 7 articles a week to 4 back in January so I assumed people would find the greater frequency more familiar. Given me something to think about.

And we'd be very happy if you were going to write something but there's no pressure.
 
Speaking as a reader of the articles, not a writer, I think the current frequency is about right. If I don't read for a few days, or even a week or two, there's not too much of a backlog so I'll still at least glance at all the articles I've not yet read. If there were a new article almost every day (a la the 5 or 6 times a week which was mentioned), then that would increase the chance that I would miss one or more articles, or decide not to read it/them because there's now too many to catch up on, based on my sometimes limited time available to read. Obviously other readers will have different opinions, as everyone's situations are different, but I thought I'd put in my tuppence-worth.

(I'll also have a think about whether I could morph from being just a reader to an occasional writer, but don't hold your collective breaths please - I don't want your deaths on my conscience!)
Technically you are already a published SLP writer of course thanks to N'Oublions Jamais, if @Youngmarshall is not aware due to username aliases.
 
Technically you are already a published SLP writer of course thanks to N'Oublions Jamais, if @Youngmarshall is not aware due to username aliases.

I'll admit when I first read N'Oublions Jamais, and very much enjoyed it, one of my first thoughts was how few of the authors name I could match to forum usernames.

I got an email the other day with an article for the site, which I loved and I'm excited to put up, from an Ishan Sharma. No idea who that was in terms of username until Ishan informed me. It's an interesting thing that both the articles and the published stories are credited to people's real names and the forum posts tend not to be.

I've been posting in one forum or another as youngmarshall for must be 15 years but I have been tempted to change it to Gary Oswald on here to avoid that confusion.
 
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