Issue 6 Retrospective and Looking Ahead

Production of Issue 6

Our January issues remain our most difficult. Their release date is only two weeks following a lengthy holiday season that sees most of our editors sprawled across multiple continents. Each year we find ourselves returning home the first week of January and playing frantic catch-up. In the end, everything always comes together, but there are plenty of late nights to make it happen.

There are rumblings among the Radon editors that we should shift our issue release schedule over by one month to prevent this issue. But we’ll need to take a lot of thought to decide if this is something we want to do, and we remain undecided.

Procuring art for each issue remains difficult. We would love it if artists came to us through our Submittable, but they are few and far between. All but once we have had to reach out privately to artists to obtain our art, and we expect this to continue based on trends.

Print Possibility

Now that we have our feet firmly planted in a routine schedule for issue production, we are toying with the idea of simultaneously producing issues via a Print-On-Demand service. This would allow our readers and authors who wish for a more tactile experience to enjoy a traditional paper product. That it would cost us nothing but additional labor hours to make happen is an alluring one. That said, we would need to take most of this year to scope out the currently numerous POD offerings and see if one would be feasible.

State of Issue 7

We are firmly in the reading period for issue 7 now. Aiming to rectify our previous issues (pun intended) with scrambling to find fiction stories at the end of a reading period, we have already accepted our first prose piece. A delightful anti-fascist + pedagogy experience you won’t want to miss this May.

As this post was being typed, we accepted two poetry pieces, pulling them ahead of fiction on the metaphorical scoreboard. Poetry typically is nailed down much sooner for an issue than fiction. This may be because we have what amounts to essentially a dedicated poetry editor, but do not have the same for fiction, which has half a dozen editors. Fiction also being longer, by nature, introduces a number of failure points in the submission. Meaning we find that fiction stories often make it past the first round of discussion, but due to one point or another fail to pass final muster.

Patreon Merch re-design

For our top two supporter tiers, you can expect brand new sticker and mug designs this year. Our initial designs are special to us (and you), but we felt in our third year it was time to revitalize them. As this update occurs, we’ll keep you updated. This means that the first edition Radon stickers and mugs you currently possess will become valuable time capsules.

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Thank you again to all of you for supporting us and your wonderful discussions on our Discord you are helping drive. We are at 57% funding and growing, on track for a wonderful third year full of enhancements and growth. Should you have any comments or suggestions for our journal, please don't hesitate to let us know in a comment below, or at RadonJournal@gmail.com