End of the line for Code Quarterly | Hacker News Reader

End of the line for Code Quarterly

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56 pointshandraiser18 comments

I didn't see anything about payment. I run both groovymag and jsmag - monthly PDF publications - and I share the pain of finding and curating good content on a regular periodic basis.

With that, one of the challenges I've had is that in some cases, some authors who might otherwise contribute won't because of the pay we offer. Those for whom payment is a concern end up needing to prioritize our articles lower than other commitments. I'm not complaining - I understand, and have been in that situation myself.

I didn't see anything on CQ about payment terms beyond the writer guidelines:

"Well, we’ll pay you. At the moment we’re not sure exactly how this is going to work, but the basic idea is this: We hope to make money by selling PDFs, print-on-demand books, and ebook versions of our pieces as well as from subscriptions to the print quarterly. That’s revenue. It will cost a certain amount of money to produce the Quarterly and run the web site, etc. That’s expenses. What’s left over is profit and we will split that with you in some equitable way."

For better or worse, with groovymag and jsmag, I committed to paying authors and putting out the issues before I necessarily knew I had paying customers. It was a gamble, pure and simple, but it's worked.

I'd talked with some other people who had suggested (and wanted to pursue) community publishing which would share 'profits' of magazine sales equitably with authors. Interestingly, very few of the authors I spoke to (basically 1) had any interest at all in that. The ones who wanted money just wanted to get paid, not wait around for weeks or get quarterly royalty payment checks from back issues. They just wanted to submit a piece and get paid. Fair enough.

The push for 'community sharing of revenue' doesn't seem to come from the authors that I know. Certainly, if we were talking about numbers with a couple more zeros at the end, they might care, but even people who write long form tech books generally don't do it primarily for the money, as they know they're not going to retire on royalties from a book on CouchDB.

P.S. - if you're interested in contributing pieces on advanced javascript or groovy, ping me at michael@jsmag.com

tl,dr - CQ might have taken off had there been an up-front commitment to kickstart the chicken/egg problem of content/readers by greasing the wheels a bit with some initial purchased content.

Part of the problem may have been that I was coming more from a perspective of book publishing--the original idea was that CQ articles would be more like short books rather than long blog posts. And books you are paid by quarterly royalties. In fact, my payment scheme was pretty much identical to the Pragmatic Bookshelf model except that a given piece might be appear in multiple places--an issue of CQ, a collection of related articles, etc.

But maybe I didn't make that clear or maybe that made it even harder to find writers since it's more challenging to write long than short. (I did adjust back from my original idea of very long pieces but that didn't make enough difference.)

Good point. I wrote to someone else on this thread - telling someone 8000-20000 words will scare off all but the few people who've already done that level of writing before.

I feel particularly knotty about this news because I pitched Peter a magazine idea back in February '10. Pasting in the initial email for reference here, and to close the loop:

---

Subject: Maybe a magazine.

Hi Peter.

I read your comment about starting another book after "Coders at Work", and thought I should pitch you an idea...

Instead of a book, consider creating a magazine. An intelligent forum for essays and articles discussing the nitty-gritty of the software topics covered by "Coders at Work" would be an invaluable resource. It's a hole that's being filled poorly by discussions on blogs, Hacker News, freenode, and Google Groups. You're in somewhat of a unique position, with the connections to solicit contributions from the leading lights, so to speak.

Here's a hypothetical table of contents, just for kicks:

    * Brendan Eich on ECMAScript5.
    * A critical reading of The TeXbook.
    * Build your own homoiconic mini-language.
    * A brief history of exceptions.
    * Thomas Ptacek on safely storing passwords.
    * Fun with Octrees.
    * Visualizing strange attractors.
    * How to implement significant whitespace.
    ... and so on.

Naturally, the magazine wouldn't have to be print-only, or even print-first. I'd imagine that every article would exist first on the web, with groups of them getting packaged up into issues every month or two, and made available for purchase using MagCloud or LuLu. With programmers as your target audience, I think it could do quite well.

I think you're one of the few people out there with incredible writing chops, and a deep understanding of code, so... it's just a thought.

Cheers, -- Jeremy Ashkenas

What loop? I'm sorry, but the only thing I can take from this comment is: "I'm so awesome because it was really my idea that didn't work out."

But, positively responding to your comment, I'd really like to read all of those articles, and I wish they had been written (or maybe they have been on various blogs).

My apologies then, no awesomeness intended -- I meant to convey that I feel particularly bad about the shutting down of Code Quarterly because I helped plant the idea in Peter's head ... and then never really found the time to help him out with it.

I thought folks might be interested in the email from the very beginning to see things come full circle, now that it's officially through.

I submitted an article, but failure to receive a response in a timely manner caused me to edit (probably poorly) myself, and just publish it on my blog [I did actually get a positive response after I had already published it, nearly 2 months later].

Peter certainly wasn't working on this full time, so it's completely understandable that there'd be delays, but it's too easy to just publish an article you've written on a blog and get instant gratification. And for that reason, the model that Hacker Monthly uses, seems much, much, much more viable.

Very sad news indeed. As a contributor to Code Quarterly (the only one it seems) I was willing to put in the work to make it a success. It truly seemed like a publication that I would like to read. And that's the thing isn't it? We complain that there is nothing for "us programmers", but it seems that if we want it we need to create it. Otherwise we'll just need to settle for the dreck found in the grocer's aisle. You can never have too many articles on building the ultimate game machine.

I think it could still be done, but there needs to be more than one at the helm. After the initial announcement that he was accepting proposals, I never heard about it again until the Sussman and Hickey interviews (thanks btw).

There is certainly a need for this, and despite Hacker Monthly's success, it's not exactly "there." That said, maybe the model, at least to start with, is something that pulls and edits existing blog content (maybe even expands upon the post) and has a few all new articles. Maybe getting 10-15 high quality, from scratch, 4-5 page articles a quarter is just too much to ask in the age of blog.

This is a sad day. A lot of good thought went into the plans for multi-form publication and the design for different form-factors. If anyone is interested in working on publishing readable, annotated code in print and on mobile devices, please get in touch.

Best of luck to Peter as a writer and editor. We need more technical people who enjoy crafting clear prose.

Indeed, if you are interested in exploring interesting ways of publishing stuff with great design, get in touch with Adam; he's awesome.

I find it very interesting that over 400 people expressed interest in writing, but only 13 even made it to the contract signing stage. So only 3% of all interest materialized. And at the end of it all only 1/400 made it to the publishable stage.

As another comment mentioned, the amount of time the editor had probably made some difference. But, I still think it is interesting. It's common sense that people like to back out once actual work materializes, but 3% is really low.

I believe that's 400 people who told Peter that they would be possibly interested in contributing something back when he first floated the idea. I was one of those 400, but when the time came I didn't have a subject lined up that I felt was suitable for the format. I think that's why starting something like this is much harder than sustaining it. In the next year I might come up with two or three things suitable for the journal and put them aside until I have time to develop them into an article, but coming up with something to fit a deadline is much more difficult. Coming up with a topic for an inaugural issue that will presumably set the tone for the publication is even more daunting.

I submitted an article, two actually. Peter gave extensive feedback and went over it in person with me on his own time. He was looking at first for quite long (20k) pieces, which was beyond my ability and depth of knowledge. At the time I wondered if there were enough writers of that caliber available.

I don't think there are. Most of the pieces I publish are in the 2000 word range - some are longer-form series that it takes several months for the authors to put together, so the 'final' series might be 10,000 words or so, but it's done over a long time. Writing and editing that much cohesively is simply too time consuming for most people to do quickly.

As someone in different part of the same field (programming-related writing and publishing), this is sad but unsurprising news. I've had very little success (with a few nice exceptions) dealing with third party writers, even those I offered handsome fees too.

It seems that developers who are actually pretty good at their game are rarely either great writers or the sort of people who really want to be published (enough to get over writer's block, anyway). The people who are good in both of these areas are.. writing books or publishing their own stuff! :-)

It's a hard game to play which is why I've moved more into the weekly newsletter side of things. Instead, I point to the best articles directly on people's blogs, rather than attempt to cajole them to let me publish it separately. It seems to be working, for now.

Man, what a bummer. I was so looking forward to that magazine.

It was a good effort, Peter, and fwiw your advice caused me to step up my game. You're a good editor and I'm sure the next thing will be big.

Good luck!

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