Issue 1 Summer: no theme, quote: Man is an artifact built for space"
issue 2 Fall: no theme
Issue 3 Winter: Robots
Issue 4 Spring: "sub-space" theme built off one article
Issue 5 Summer: Sathar theme of some sort (iggy and I had a conversation going on this discussing theme titles and the kind of content it would have all around the sathar but I cant locate the conversation right now) None the less I think a big sathar issue would be nice though we may need a second issue to wrap up stuff started in issue 4. so the big sathar theme could be for issue 6.
Do we really want to theme so often? Trying to get articles of one theme seems to have slowed down SFman. At least that is how it has felt to me. In the above plan the setup could be modified to theme, no theme, back and forth just by changing issue 4 to no theme. This would give us the freedom needed to get issues out without waiting on a specific article. Also it gets peoples submissions into print sooner which is the pay they are getting for letting us publish their stuff without pay. We pay in exposure.
-iggy
Good question, iggy. Actually, i spent a lot of time analyzing Wargames Illustrated in the run up to publishing FE simply because it was a professional commercial magazine. One thing I observed is that when it has a theme its 3-5the articles and not the whole magazine. In fact its themes are usually less than 5 articles. So if we do a theme we do not need to make everything match the theme only, if it does no complaints. Absolutely we need to be moving material and not let it linger and at some point i could see us sweeping up the scraps of the submission cue floor and dumping it all into one issue- especially if we had multiple submissions of a type of article that we normally one put one in an issuse and it would take to long to get them all published.
Just a dralasite exploring the Frontier.