Work History: Web Publisher

This is the first in a series of posts wherein I will talk about my work experience and goals, for the benefit of potential employers.

Question: What do you want to do?

Short Answer: I want to be a professional online magazine publisher.

Long Answer:

The main project that has occupied my time since leaving my last full-time position is Revolving Floor. It’s an interactive literary magazine, publishing content of various sorts (creative nonfiction, film, animation, poetry, fiction) related to a different topic every month. The goal is to monetize the site by getting those monthly topics sponsored. Some of the money will be used to pay the contributors, and some of it will go into operational costs, including wages for the person who runs it, i.e. me. and eventually others.

I produced Revolving Floor, which is to say, I came up with the idea, chose all the contributors, chose the designers and developers involved, and gave everyone direction. I am now the publisher, meaning that I’m running the site, managing ongoing development and design, and serving as the senior editor. I spend time looking for new contributors, evaluating submitted content, coming up with future topics, leading discussions among contributors about the nature of the site, and keeping up a dialog with potential sponsors. I also put time into social media promotion and optimization: RF’s second highest source of traffic (after direct) is our Facebook fan page, where we have, as of this writing, 285 fans. I also run the Twitter identity, @revolvingfloor. Every time there’s a new piece of content, I FB share and tweet about it, and I also sometimes use the FB page and the Twitter account to promote other projects that RF contributors are involved in. I also spend time with the analytics, noting popular pieces of content, traffic sources, traffic spikes and dropoffs and the reasons why, periodically sharing this information, and my insights into it, with the contributors.

So. What I really want to do, is run Revolving Floor professionally. But since that isn’t going to be possible in the near future, I would like to make my living by helping other, better-funded organizations that need analogous skills. The reason I was able to pull RF together was because I have a range of experience and skills that pretty much span all aspects of online publishing and promotion, including content creation. I can take a similarly high-level role in the creation and/or running of another media property, or I could take one of the subsidiary roles that are equally covered by my experience: strategy, content management, content creation, web development and design management, social media strategy and optimization, and web traffic analytics.

In upcoming posts, I will be going into a bit more detail about my experience and skills in specific areas.