End of the line for Code Quarterly

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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