Episode 11 | Paid subscriptions and virtual conferences with Hal Niedzviecki of Broken Pencil Magazine

Welcome to the Paywall podcast where we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies. We will talk with some of the publishers that we work with at Zine 101. The things that work and the things that don't. There are so many amazing things you can do in the digital world as a publisher to not only increase your digital subscriptions, but also engage your audience. Let's get started.

Hi, I'm Pete and welcome to episode 11 of the Paywall podcast. I am with Hal Niedsvietzky from Toronto, Canada, who is the publisher of Broken Pencil magazine. And today we're going to talk about two very interesting things. One is Hal brought online digital subscriptions and set up paywall. Also brought on real web issues for his print publication. And secondly, hopefully we'll have time to talk about your virtual canzine event, which is typically a real annual event, but it went virtual this year and I think a lot of publishers would be really interested in hearing about how that process went. So welcome Hal.

Hello Pete. Thanks for having me on the show.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. This is going to be fun. Now you're in Toronto, you're the publisher of Broken Pencil magazine. So what I know so far is that you're kind of like a publisher of, you know, appealing to other publishers. Your, your crowd are independent arts publishers generally in Canada, I think, and your mission seems to be to help those independent publishers succeed in the world of publishing. This could be comic book publishers and other arts style publishers. And you have your own print publication and digital publication called Broken Pencil Magazine. How do I do?

Yeah, pretty good overall.

We've got.

A magazine that we've been running since 1995 in fact. So we're getting up there and it's a magazine devoted to independent and underground publishing projects on the page. So printed, printed publishing zines is sort of the common terminology out there now, which basically means sort of a independently created mini magazine, usually done on a not for profit basis. And, and that's what we kind of celebrate are those little mini underground independent publications that proliferate all over the world, often without, you know, a lot of.

People knowing that this is a thing.

And so there's, you know, there's all kinds of, of micro publications out there, ranging from just sort of rants to comics to beautiful art projects, to kind of people devoted to political change or social issues. Lots and lots of arts and culture.

Going on as well.

And we just have a lot of fun with it and exist to, to really promote this idea that anybody can be part of the Media. Anyone can publish and contribute to their, the fabric of their community and their society by, by getting their voice out there.

And, you know, we celebrate that.

Yeah, that's, that's cool. It's. It looks like you have a lot of fun. I'm getting your, your magazine now myself and, and you have. There's a lot of creativity out there. And it seems like there are hundreds, at least hundreds and hundreds of independent arts publishers, maybe into the thousands around you.

And probably there's thousands.

I mean, in Canada and the U.S.

Alone, there's probably at least, you know, somewhere in the range of 3,000 itinerant publishers coming up. You know, people will put out a few zines, a few comics, then they might stop for a few years and they might come back to it. So it's, it's very irregular and that's part of what makes it fun. This is not your, you know, this is not your Sports Illustrated or whatever, your Time magazine. You know, this is very personal projects that people want to. Want to do, but some people have.

Been going for, for a long time.

And are like, super consistent and even have kind of a larger fan base. But for the most part, it's, it's something that people do for, for, for love and because they want to, they want to get something out there and they want it to be tangible and visible in their community, which is, you know, different from just throwing up a blog or starting a really exciting Twitter feed.

And that's where print leads, right? Like paper. The artistic craft lands on paper. And that's what has the impact even in this digital world.

Yeah, I think so. And I mean, it has a tremendous staying power in the sense that in the early 2000s, when kind of we were just being absolutely demolished by the onset of digital, and everyone said, you know, this is it. This is it for newspapers, this is, this is it for magazines. And in our kind of world that people were saying, well, who's going to make zines now? Who's going to make little underground print projects when you can just put something up on the Internet and reach a global audience? Well, didn't work out that way. In fact, more people now are turning back to print projects than ever, because the digital sphere turned out to be much more isolating and limited than we thought it would be. Not only is there sort of a massive corporate infrastructure that, that you have to attach yourself to if you want to publish online, not to mention, you know, increasing censorship and ad delivery systems that are watching everything you write and put up there, but you Also have just that lack of intimacy, that lack of being able to put something in someone's hand or in someone's mailbox and they have that object and they see the care and love that you've put into that and they feel it. And that makes them have a different appreciation for your creation than if I just said to you. Here's the link.

Right? So the thing that jumps into my head is you have a lot of small print publishers. How are, and this is a question that we get from, from publishers all the time is especially if they're digital only and they're thinking about print, are they, is there and maybe in Canada and in the US are there resources for small batch printing for, for, you know, small.

I mean there's a, there's tremendous. You know, the reason that, that the zine revolution came into being was because of the rise of easily accessible, low cost alternatives to web offset printing. So you have, you had the gestetner, if anyone remembers that, and then you had the photocopier. And the photocopier was a revolution. So most of our people are photocopying.

Interesting.

You know, you can go to whatever, a local outfit or even a, you know, a bigger outfit that does corporate publishing and say, hey, make me 200 of this, 200 of a 16 page zine. That's not going to cost you very much and you can build up from there. So some people are publishing very beautifully in very small editions and it just is something that you can move up or down the price scale. There's tremendous opportunities now for sort of.

Small, small runs of really fancy things if you want to do that. You know, there's just no, there's no shortage of things you can do and people willing to do that because of the technologies are so different now like it used to be. Well, if we're going to put something on the press, you know, it takes so much effort. The, the lowest amount of copies you, you would want to make would be, you know, a thousand or two thousand copies. But now it's, you can, you can really do, you can, you can do a small run. You could do 200, 300 copies and, and have a reasonable amount of, of cost versus revenue. I mean you're, you know, this isn't how, this isn't a way to get rich. But if, if it's your passion.

Yeah, then for sure, that's cool. How'd you get into this by the way?

Well, I'm a writer. I, I write books. That's my, sort of, my main Thing you could say. So when I was a younger man writing kind of a lot of strange stuff, little stories and you know, kind of avant garde work, I started discovering.

Zines and really small literary magazines and.

Journals and I started publishing in those places. And then I realizing that publication was great, but it was difficult because nobody could find these publications. And this is pre Internet. Right. And I'm 50 now. So this is when I was kind of, you know, in my, in my early 20s. So I decided that I would kind of start a magazine that would make this more accessible to people and, and sort of spread the idea of independent publishing and underground writing and, and just make it, you know, make, make it possible to find these things a lot easier. And so that's how we started Broken Pencil.

That's cool. So you saw the need. People just, they were publishing cool stuff and. But doing it all wrong as far as promotion or getting, getting out there.

Yeah, I mean there was just very limited opportunities if you didn't have any money. You know, in this and especially in the pre Internet age, you can't just post on your, on your Facebook page and let people know you've done something right. Here's where to find it. You know, you could go around to a few small stores that would carry these, these things. They might take a few copies. So it was pretty hard to. To get the word out. Things like Broken Pencil were really helpful in that way.

That's a good segue to the website itself. When I met you, which was year plus ago, I can't remember when we worked on your site, maybe it was a couple years ago.

Well, we did version one and then version two. Right.

We were involved in version two. So version one you had. And I know with Kanzine and your events and your awards, you're really showcasing your publishers as much as you can get that exposure going. And if I remember correctly, you had a print subscription running on version one of your sites. And then we talked about doing two things. One is really kind of putting a full subscription service on there and paywalling the content. And two, sort of in tandem with that is putting all your premium content on the web as well so that it would be available digitally as well of course as print. And then the paywall would, you know, with leaky paywall would, would encourage people to subscribe.

Right.

That sound about right?

Yeah, I mean we had a bunch of quite a lot of content online, but we weren't hiding it behind paywalls. And we were not kind of making use of the fact that we had, you know, thousands and thousands of zine book and comic reviews going all the way back to 1995.

Right, right, 19. Yeah. So you had a lot. And you had, what were they, PDFs.

Yeah, we had PDFs mostly. We had sent out a lot of our early issues before, before there was such a thing as Adobe, you know, design and, and all that stuff. Desktop design. We had sent out a bunch of, you know, we had, we digitalized a ton of issues. Digitalized, digitized, let's go with that. And yeah, and then we had just glut of content to get up on the web. I mean, you know, we always, we actually had one of the first websites for a culture magazine in Canada. We started our website, I believe in 1996. So we always had that web presence but we didn't really know what to do with it in terms of.

How.

Do we reach customers.

Right, right, right. And that's, yeah, I remember that's what we talked about was, you know, getting more Google traffic and social sharing, all that through putting the actual content on the, on the website. Instead of just having a PDF, you'd have like real web articles that Google could index and that. We did that through our issue M software so that you could have, you know, the web articles which would be shared and be socially shared found in search. And then we attached. Now Flipbooks, if you go to the site you can, if you're a paid subscriber, you can open the Flipbook and read that version as well.

That's right. And if you're not a paid subscriber, you can sign up for sort of introduction. Oh.

I think you just faded out, Hal.

Check out one, one Flipbook version of the, of the print edition. So it's a pretty cool, it's a pretty cool system because you, you know, no risk and you can go and actually read the whole magazine.

Right. Let me just back up a little because you blipped out for a second. So I'm looking at the site now and you have a, it's a free, free level subscription where once you run out of your, your sort of casual, couple of casual articles, then you can sign up and get six free premium articles each month. And then of course once you exhaust that, then you pay for full access.

So right. You get, you get the six articles but you also get one, one issue.

Of the Flipbook which is, that's a great. And so how's that working for you? That, that sort of free registration, paid subscription model.

Yeah, I mean it seems to be Working really well, you know, in terms of just pure revenue growth, which is, you know, let's get down to the nuts and bolts. Revenue is up and, and we can get into the, the exact details of, of that. What I mean by that and general, you know, we're able to track more readers and, and sort of see that, yeah, they're signing up, they're, they're, they're, they're signing up for that free tier. Yep. And you know, we can see that and that obviously that gives us their address and their email and so we can, you know, we can work on seeing if they're interested down the road. And that's sort of, now that we've got four months of the, of this running, we can start kind of doing a little bit of experimenting on what's going to get these, what's going to get these free signups to move to paid.

Right.

What kind of offer can we, can we bring to them? So, but you know, one of the things that was really interesting is that we did not get nearly as many free signups as I thought we would compared to the increase in paid signups, paid subscribers.

Interesting. What would you say your percentage is as far as free versus paid when, you know, month to month so far?

Yeah, I mean, I did a, an initial analysis of the first month, which was sort of November to December 2020. This is that we had this system sort of fully up and running and we had about 14, 15, 16, 16 subscriptions versus 12 free access signups.

Wow.

So, you know, we had, you know, it wasn't, wasn't. It was probably like 60, 40. And I was just, just before I talked to you, of course, I, you know, left everything to the last minute. I ran another, I ran a comparison on the quarter of November 1, 2020 to the end of February 2021, and looked at the numbers on that, but I forgot to look at how many signups we had on the free side. I only looked at the money side. So. But I can tell you on the money side, the, the growth continues in terms of, of subscription growth. When I compare it to where we were a year ago, that's great.

That's.

And I can, you know, so I mean, I looked at the actual kind of percentages. So in, in terms of our pure, like, new reoccurring revenue compared to the, these four months, December to the end of February versus a year ago, same four months, yeah, we're up 62%.

That's a good number.

Yeah. So I mean, that's a, you know, this isn't, we're not talking about a kind of a small change. We're talking about a pretty impressive change. And you know, in terms of just sort of the net amount of money being spent, we're up 33%. So again, it's a, it's a pretty good looking number.

And so now you're selling. If I go to the site, I see you offer both digital subscriptions and print subscriptions. How does that break down? So you're, you know, you're putting, you're putting all your content on the web. That's, that's like a magnet for search and sharing. Great. Now people are ready to pay. Are they going for digital? Are they going for print? Because they want the print product. I know you have a, you have a premium offering as well, like a premium plus offering, right?

Yeah. So I mean, if you went for the regular subscription, that would include all digital access.

Right.

So that's just something to keep in mind when we get into these numbers. Basically, you know, we added a lot of print and a lot of premium and a small number of digital. Interesting in those four months. And I think this gets back to what we were talking about earlier, is there is in our community there's a love of print and it's, you know, we're celebrating print culture. So I think a lot of people want to connect with the print culture and, and see the actual magazine.

Yep, yep. So you're, yeah, it's a, you're leveraging a digital mechanism to ultimately sell more print is what's happening here.

Yeah, exactly. And, and you know, I mean, the printed, the print edition is, is, it's beautiful. Where, you know, we've, we've moved to full color. We're were, we've sort of upgraded our design standards from previous years. When we were, you know, when we first started, we were more of a really kind of like punk rock looking and it's so, it's nice, it's an, it's nice to get that in the mail. You know, on the other hand, we can now offer a pretty affordable $3.50 a month completely digital access to everything we've done since 1995. So that's, you know, that's, that's if, if, if, if you don't want to bother with print, if you don't want to, want to spend the money or you don't have the money or, you know, you just, you just want to get what you want to get quickly, it's cool to have that option. But I also, you Know, definitely am seeing that our readership is attracted to the print and the premium models.

Yeah, that's really interesting. One of the things I've noticed over time the last few months is you've been adding more back issues to the site. I remember we first launched, I don't know, you had maybe a year or two years worth of, of issues that were loaded up as real, real web articles, you know, that you could, you could go to and you know, read on mobile and search friendly and all that. But then, you know, I checked a few weeks ago and I lo and behold, I noticed that you had almost doubled, it seemed like the number of back issues that you had loaded up onto the site. And I'm not sure if it's a mix of web articles and flipbooks or whatnot, but have you noticed any change in traffic or subscriptions or any sort of feedback on do you have more content available?

Yeah, really interesting. I mean I've noticed and in fact, until you have pointed that out, I wasn't really connecting the dots which is that in fact our, our number of people subscribing to the free level is increasing versus well, you know, our paid is, is also increasing and it's too early to kind of see where it's all going to settle out because we're only four months in. But in the last month we've definitely had, so even in the last kind of, you know, if I'm looking just at March, so whatever, 10 days, I'm counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 real time data here, you know, we've got something in the range of 10 people have signed up to for the free level.

Yep, yep.

By comparison, in the first month we only had 10 people signed up for the free level in the first month of operation. So, so we're seeing an increase in that as we put more and more content on that people want to access is the way I'm, I'm thinking, you know, I don't, I mean you may, you may have a different interpretation of why we're seeing that increase now.

Well, so I, excuse me, I went to the, to the archives and I just dug in just to see what your back issues were doing. And what you're doing is you're, or what you have done is loaded up a lot of your old flipbooks which is a quick way to create the issue, upload the flipbook and so there's definitely more available. Now if I as a reader go into an archives and I see that there's a lot there, then of course that's super enticing. Right? I mean, I just, I mean I'm scrolling down your archives and I just keep scrolling. There's a lot, like I said before, it's probably twice as much. You know, one of the things that you could do of course is, you know, migrate those flipbook articles or PDF articles into real web articles at some point. You know, we do have some publishers that do that over time. They'll publish an issue going forward and then each month they have an issue going forward, then they publish an issue going backwards.

Yeah, and that's, you know, what we're doing right now is getting, getting all the issues into the system and then we're going to bring all the, all the articles individually and assign them to those issues. So you can go all the way back to 1995 and read the issue and click on articles. So that will take a little while just because some of that is going to have to be done by hand.

Yep.

Because quite a bit of the material is already in the site. It's just not arranged correctly. It's just, it's free floating, free floating data that, that is impossible to find. So we're gonna, we're gonna have to go through and you know, and search by, by kind of titles and stuff to start assigning to specific issues. But yeah, I think, you know, I think when you just click on those, you click on that, that sort of back issues button and you go down a really long way. Although, you know, and that, and we haven't even gotten everything in there yet, so I think it's impressive for people. And you know, when we, we were setting up the new site, we were discussing what should the tagline be and, and we all sort of were like, well, we want to emphasize that we have, you know, literally 15,000 zine reviews. And so we ended up going with that tagline 15,000 zine reviews and growing.

It's impressive.

Yeah.

And you know, every, just to kind of follow up on that, you know, every article that you do bring live on the web is a magnet for a specific, you know, Google search and promotes sharing. And I know we talked about this before, but there's some low cost options for like if you have an issue that's only on a PDF and you don't have it on the web at all, you know, to get somebody to copy and paste, you know, all the articles and issue, you know, it's, it's many hours of work to format it and get it right. But if you want somebody offshore to do it you know, just remind me and I can send you that, that info.

Yeah, I mean we have sort of a plan. We do get a lot of interns, a lot of, a lot of glorious student labor that come from the various publishing programs.

Yeah.

In, in the Toronto area. So we put them to work on some of this stuff as well as, you know, more inspirational material for them.

That's good.

Oh yeah, you know, it's a, it's a, it's patience. Also, you know, we're a small cultural magazine that is a not for profit and, and funded by various sources, particularly the Canadian government. Go Canada. So it's, you know, our prior, we, we, we move a little slower and a little more patiently than maybe, you know, a for profit company might move. So, you know, we play the long game. Right.

That's the only way to go.

And sometimes I, I have a project like this one and I know it's going to take probably a year to get it all sorted out. So hopefully I can come back in a year and tell you what happened to our numbers when we had issues 1 to 81 to 95, all on the line, all accessible as web articles.

Yeah, well, it's all part of, and this is sort of a print versus digital mentality as far as marketing goes, where you're sort of executing an inbound lead strategy for your paid subscribers. And what does that mean? That means that every article that you publish on the web, not in a PDF form or flipbook form, but an actual web article, is a magnet for Google search. So it's attracting Google search. It's also getting shared in social media and that's really inbound. Right. Whereas the traditional print world, pre Internet was always about sending mailers out, outbound marketing. So you get a list and I've learned recently about the lists that are available especially. It's just so much, the databases are enormous and you can buy these databases and mail out to them physical mail. And it's all outbound. And I know that, you know, I talked to a lot of publishers that haven't really made that bridge yet where they're, they're printing and it could be, you know, like a weekly news publisher or a magazine publisher and they're promoting and they're just constantly pushing outwards but they're not really looking at the opportunity of the inbound side. And that's, and that's where you're getting your content on the web and letting Google do its magic, letting social sharing do its magic, capturing that email address which is what you're doing with that free subscription. And then now, now you have the email address. Now of course you're mailing them back every, every month with your new content. So now you're, now you're going from inbound back to outbound, you know, because now you're sending emails straight to the, to those free, you know, and paid subscribers and, and staying in touch with them. So there's a whole new, there's a whole new loop, like marketing loop that I think publishers are learning that you're now well down like you're set up for, for making all that happen. And now.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

It all kind of fine tune it, you know.

And you know, we did, we have done the outbound experiment and it's, it's a huge outlay of money for a pretty small return. That old way of doing things where you'll, you know, you'll, you'll, you'll send an offer to thousands of people and you get this incredibly small return. But you do it because that used to be the only way to do it. What else could you do? So this gives you another tool, especially if you are like us, a low income kind of operation where you don't have, you know, we don't have a, even a fifty thousand dollar marketing budget.

Right, right.

You know, and the kind of things that we're talking about, if you're going to buy lists and send out a lot of fancy, fancy promotions with business reply mail and the whole business, you know.

Right.

If to make that work you, you need to spend a lot of money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Yeah, yeah, that, and that's, that's tough because you don't have the relationship either when you're pushing out like that. Where like today, the modern, the modern savvy digital consumers, you know, you got to start a digital relationship which is when they give you their email address. That's the start of the relationship. Right, right. Well, actually land on your site is when is the start of the relationship? And then you know, they level up by giving you an email address and then you give them something in return like free, free access, limited access. And then, then hopefully, you know, at some point. And it's like farming. Right. Like, you know, they get your content now every month and then at some point they want access if they're really interested in.

Yeah, exactly. And it's all, you know. It's also worth noting that since we moved to the leaky paywall model, we have increased our newsletter signups considerably. So we're, you know, we we have a substantial change per month in how many people are signing up to the newsletter outside of anything else, like signing up for a free trial, you know, six, Six articles and a free issue, flipbook issue. So, you know, it all, it all comes together.

Do you monetize your email? Do you have a, do you have sponsors for your advertisers, for your email?

We do have that option and we don't get, you know, a huge amount of people taking that option, but sometimes, probably two or three times a year, we'll. We'll have sponsors for our newsletter. You know, again, it's, it's. We don't have a kind of person who goes out there and says, hey, come on, let's advertise with us. It's a word. It's more of a word of mouth kind of thing. But, you know, we've been going for so long and we have a lot of dedicated readers. And so, you know, we do have a solid almost 20,000 people on our, on our mailing list. And, and it's just been growing more and more with, with this new website and, and higher traffic and everything.

Well, put it, Put a banner up on your next email that says this, this space available.

Yeah, we should actually. We should. You know, we really should. We've been. It's one of those things where you start a magazine because you love the arts and then you, you know, and that's me, and I'm still writing books and, you know, focused on that and focused on the content. But you, you also have to learn the business side. And, you know, I've become a much more savvy publisher, but they're still, you know, every day I find out something, something that I could be doing.

Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Well, that could trigger somebody who just emails you and says how much, you know.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, it's. Again, it's one of those things where a lot of our advertisers want to be in the magazine. They want, they want print.

Right.

Which is probably different from, you know, what we. What, what, what a lot of, you know, publications are seeing.

Right.

But our advertisers are like, no, you know, give us, Give us a, Give us the back page. Give us the back cover. Interesting, because that's, you know, that's, that's sort of where, where our readers respond.

Cool. All right, so let's switch gears a little bit here. Now, I really want to talk about your canzine. So this, this is your annual event, and I think what's really, really interesting And I, you know, when you were actually having the event, I kind of poked in and out a little bit, but there seemed to be so much going on, I almost felt a little overwhelmed. But what was cool is that you have, you have this annual, and correct me if I'm wrong, you have an annual event. It's a, it's an, it's a, you know, in person event, traditional event where your crowd, the zine publishers get together and you do awards and you feature and you know, do workshops and stuff like that. But this year, this past year, of course, because of COVID you couldn't do it. Like zillion other publishers couldn't have a live event. And as far as I can tell, most publishers kind of just put the brakes on and didn't do anything. But you were one of the few publishers that said, you know what? We're going to do a virtual Kanzine event. And so I kind of want to dig in a little bit into, you know, if you could kind of give a little more background to what your real in person event is like and then what you did differently or what you did to create a virtual event.

Sure, yeah, it's, you know, kind of an amazing thing. So Canzine was our kind of, our festival that we started. And one of you know, one of the reasons we started Canteen was as a, as a marketing tool for the magazine. For all the reasons we just discussed. We didn't have the kind of money you need to, to kind of do direct mail or anything like that or buy advertising. So we, we started our own sort of grassroots festival in Toronto and we'd, we would gather the zine publishers, you know, in a hall and people would come in and they would walk through and admire the, all the different underground publishing going on by stuff. And at the same time, of course we would sell them a subscription to Broken Pencil or an issue or at least try to get their, their email. We had different, you know, every year we tried some new, new tactic and, and generally it worked great and it became, took on a life of its own and eventually sort of Canzine ended up becoming its own entity, although still affiliated with the magazine. And we started doing tanzines in four or five different cities a year. So in addition to Toronto, we were doing Vancouver, Ottawa and trying to do a pop up city that, that wasn't big enough to do every year, but you know, just bring the, bring the flavor to, to a smaller place.

Yeah.

So obviously we were faced with no Canzine, which was both a budgetary concern because Canine was one of those things that drives traffic interest and subscriptions to the magazine. And also an important part of the. The publishers, all our underground independent publishers counted on Canzine to. To make money. So we didn't want to let them down either. Right. So we, we went to the arts councils, which we have in Canada, I think we've mentioned this. And, you know, they, they were giving out special grants for this kind of thing. We said, hey, we, we got to figure something out. And we, we got some extra money from them to develop a virtual Canzine. And what we ended up doing was sort of creating a world of Canzine where we had, I think we had something in the range of 250 vendors, which was. Which is usually what we would have in Toronto and then we'd have, you know, another 200 in Vancouver and 100 in Ottawa and so on, so forth. So it was still smaller than what we would normally be doing, but it was better than nothing.

Right, right.

And we put all those vendors into our virtual world and you could go. And they each had their own individual page where they could sell their products. And everything went through. Through a. Help me out here. Went through Shopify. There we go.

Got it. Right.

So everything was automatic. And the, you know, what we really did differently from what a lot of people were trying to do was we made it one giant cart, which was really important because people don't want to go and pay shipping and charges and fees for, for 15 different shops.

Right.

And log in 15 times and create 15 accounts. And so we centralized it all and that, that was what led to maximum buying. And then we are. We had all kinds of digital events with panel discussions, we had readings. You know, we had. We had just like fun, weird things, like you could click and get your zine horoscope, you know, and it just was, it was. Went much better than I thought it would, that's for sure, in terms of the. In terms of the overall response.

So when you say one giant card, did each vendor have essentially their own product page on there? Is that the way it worked?

Yeah, exactly. Okay, so it was one massive, hellish data upload where we had to upload 250 exhibitors, each one selling up to 10 products. And, you know, and each one would want to have the COVID of the product, a few inside pages, and the whole business.

Right.

Not to mention the price, the dimensions, the weight, because you had to figure out some of the shipping stuff too. So that was really the most. The technical challenges lay in that.

Interesting. How did you feed Traffic to the vendors product pages.

Well, I'm not sure. Maybe rephrase the question.

So, you know, there was a. I think I saw the section where you could go and kind of browse vendors, which is great. And I'm just wondering if there was. If there was any other pushes to a vendor's, like, product page. Like, were there call apps during the virtual, during the events or discussions, or were there emails sent or.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was heavily marketed. You know, we do have a. A pretty okay marketing budget for. For Kanzine, generally by, you know, by not for profit arts event standards. So we. Yeah, we did everything. We had emails, we had Twitter, we had Facebook ads, we had Google Ads, and then we had our secret weapon, which is our publishers. So if you have 250 people out there promoting themselves and the event as a whole, that's a huge. That's a huge help for you. Right, right. Because they all have web pages, email lists, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. They all have that stuff. So each one of them could potentially be reaching. You know, you could think, okay, maybe they're gonna reach 50 people. Some of them might be reaching a thousand or two thousand people.

Yeah, that's.

So you have to harness the power of the collective and give them the tool. So we were, you know, giving them little ads and, and banners and things they could download and, and, you know, hashtag kanzine and all that stuff and. And just, you know, we kept feeding them. Oh, you know, you can. Now, you can tell your audience that at the canzy, we're also going to be having zine horoscopes, you know, and here's a little graphic leading up to the event. So, you know, part of it is just the enthusiasm that people have for. For canzing, which is just such a great event. And part of it is. Is a little bit of canny marketing where you. You harness the power of the collective and get them to do. Do the work. Right, right.

Yeah, that's great. Of course you get the distribution channels running. How did you handle shipping? Like, how. So if I ordered from three different vendors, that sounds like a challenge.

This was the worst aspect and the least considered aspect because we had this sort of. I had a vague idea that we would get all this material in and. And it would take a few days and we'd send it all out. But I wasn't counting on the fact that we ended up with, you know, almost a thousand orders for each one having, you know, five to 30 items in it. And some of those items were tiny Little stickers that were sold for a dollar. So we were not prepared for that. And it took much longer than, you know, we should, it should have taken, it took, it took about six months to get. And then we also have two PO Boxes, one in Canada and one in the United States.

Right.

We couldn't get to the US Post Office because of COVID Yeah. Furthermore, I was planning on hiring, you know, a bunch of students, getting a bunch of volunteers and interns and the whole business to help us with this. We couldn't, we couldn't do any of that because of COVID So it just ended up taking forever. Just, just getting the packages from the US Took two months and, and you know, then it was just, just a few, a few people who, who could go into the office and, and, and prepare packages while socially distancing and being safe and the whole business. So it was tough. We got a lot of angry emails.

Yeah.

You know, three months in, like, where's my stuff? Where's my stuff? Luckily, you know, we're not selling prescription medicines. You know, we're not, we're not selling anything that people need to get right away.

Right.

And if you, if you got your zine package four months later, well, you know, I apologize. But it's also in the, in the grand scheme of what we're going through in the world.

Right.

It's not.

Well, you know, people, people calm down after an initial sort of outrage period.

Yeah. So you, earlier, you said that your expectations for, for virtual Canzine was kind of low. And once you went through it, you. It exceeded your expectations. What, what exactly about it do you made it better than you thought? And to find, follow up with that, you know, would you do it again?

Well, first of all, we are, we're doing it again. We're doing a spring canzine in association with the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, which is North America's biggest comics festival. And they usually have, you know, a huge, huge crowd that comes to Toronto every year to see their favorite literary comic artists. You know, we're talking about people who are doing sort of graphic novels and that kind of things. We're not talking about superhero stuff here. And so they're, you know, they usually have this huge audience. And of course, last year they had to cancel. And this year we, we said to them, don't cancel. You know, we did this thing with Kanzine. It worked.

Yeah.

And so, you know, let's use our platform to do this, this platform that we built. So we, we're partnering with them and we're Doing a smaller canzine and, and they're doing a huge thing using our platform. So they're going to have, you know, 350 book publishers and comics, literary comics publishers up there and we're gonna do a small cansing on the side. And yeah, you know, the big, the big thing that I was really surprised by was that people spent, you know, almost $50,000 at the zine Fair, which I just was not prepared for that level of, of, of commerce. You know, you just don't think because we could reach a global audience instead of a local audience. That's a, you know, you're making the, you're making a big leap in terms of, of how many customers you have.

How did that compare to previous years in person, the commerce?

Yeah, I mean, I, I think it's, that's, that would probably be the amount of money that was spent at all four festivals.

Huh. Wow.

As opposed to just sort of one, one festival with the amount of publications that would normally just be at Toronto. So it was a, you know, it was a big, a big spend, a lot of traffic, thousands and thousands of people dropping by, which again, you know, the Toronto Kanzing, we would usually expect to get a thousand people. So this event had more like 10,000 people. Of course, it's all over the world, people dropping in and, you know, it's a, it's just a different feeling.

Right, right.

You know, to get, to get a thousand people in your city to all come to one place is actually really hard to do. And a huge achievement to get 10,000 people to all come somewhere on the Internet is not as big an achievement, but it can be, you know, in the right circumstances, a lot of fun. And you know, I mean, in terms of profitability, this is, this was not a particularly profitable thing because we had to build an entire elaborate system. But now that we have this platform.

Right.

We can have a lot of fun with it, you know, and, and so we're, we're just adding new aspects to it and learning how to make it a little bit more friendly for us. So for instance, we're partnering with a fulfillment company this time we're not going to try to ship out, you know, $100,000 of, or quarters of graphic novels.

Smart.

And we're also, we're also upgrading the, the inputs so that the publishers can do more themselves in terms of putting in covers and those kinds of things and.

Got it. Yeah.

Finally. And to me, the most important thing were saying, you know, you can't, you can't have any dollar or $2 products.

Interesting.

Because it's financially not. Not. It's a, it's a loss for, for us to, to try to ship something that only cost a dollar.

Yeah, yeah, right.

You know, when you're, when you realize that it doesn't matter if it costs a dollar, someone still has to dig it out, find it, put it in an envelope.

Yeah, yeah. You know, interesting.

So we said, look, you know, you gotta kind of bundle. If you want to sell stickers, you gotta make a package of 10 or whatever.

Yeah, right.

So that you lower the workload on the shipping side. So it's all learning, it's all fun. You know, in terms of the, the magazine, we offer different things where if you spent a certain amount of money, you would automatically qualify for a subscription to Broken Pencil. We also had a tip function saying, look, if you leave us a $10 tip, we're going to hook you up with an intro subscription, a broken Pencil. So lots of fun things to do there as well.

Oh, that's great. That's great.

Yeah.

Wow, that's juicy tips right there, Hal. So I'll leave you with a final question. I know you have to run soon. Is there any. Other than the product side of shipping and fulfillment and getting content loaded and all that, which sounds like going to be a big improvement, is there anything on the sort of the workshop discussion side that you took away as, as, hey, this, this really worked. You know, you had, I know, it was, it was a couple days, I think you ran.

Yeah, it was four days. We ran it. Yeah.

Four days. Yeah. So it was kind of a long session and you did like, had lots of different workshops and things going on. Anything there that struck gold for you, you know, that you thought, oh, wow, that was really popular?

Well, yeah, I mean, you know, one thing I'll say is we did not have the best method for analytic collection. So don't do that, people make sure you're collecting the analytics so you actually know where people went.

Yep. Yeah.

Because the way we, the way it was set up, and I don't, I don't even know the technical terms, but it was sort of set up with a, kind of a video game platform. And so it was not. We weren't able to tell specifically where people went in terms of the events and how long they spent. But what we did do is we pre recorded everything. We didn't do any live events because we just weren't sure of the technologies and we just didn't have the, you know, we just didn't feel like we had the, the people power to, to monitor that. So, so I think that was, that was a great smart move on our part because all the events went, went off without a hitch and we were able to get everything organized beforehand and put them up and, and now we, we have those events and we're gonna, we're gonna cycle them into the Broken pencil content.

Right.

And I know you're a big fan of that because it will, it will generate links and, and Google search hits and, and it'll just be, you know, it's so, it's, it's, it's bonus product. So I would say, you know, no matter what, record everything.

Right.

Because you can then cut it up and use it for your, for your magazines, you know, as interactive content.

Right, right.

And you know, and then the other thing is ask your developers about the analytics side.

Were you on Twitch or what were you on?

Yeah, that's exactly it. We were on Twitch.

Yeah, got it.

And you know, I'm not a, I'm not a developer obviously. I'm not a huge, a huge kind of computer guy, so. Here comes the dog. Oh dear. The dog has noticed that there's someone in the backyard. Nice listeners. He is not an invader. He's just fixing something. Okay, so that's, yeah, that was Kanzine. And you know, I think even if you don't have a kind of a regular event, you could do something like that online and bring tremendous interest to your publication.

Yeah, it was a unique setup for sure. Look forward to checking out the next one that you have.

Yeah, people want to check out any of this stuff. Canzine CA is where the festival lives. And of course brokenpencil.com is the magazine.

Oh, you beat me to it. I was going to ask you where people could reach out to you.

There you go. Long time publisher. I'm surprised it took me this long.

Awesome. Well, Hal, thanks for sharing your thoughts and wisdom with our publisher audience. Very cool stuff. I know you have to run and let's do this again. Maybe we'll talk more virtual conferences after the next one.

Yeah, let's meet up. Let's meet up in six months or a year and, and I'm sure I'll have a lot more Tales from the Underground for you.

I like that Tales from the Underground might steal that.

You can't steal that. I'm pretty sure I stole it from like a, you know, creepy comic from the 1960s.

The crypt.

Yeah, exactly.

All right, Hal, have a great. Thank you.

Take care, Peter.

Yep.

Thanks for listening. To the Paywall podcast, you can find us@paywallpodcast.com Be sure to subscribe and your podcast player of choice and we'll see you next episode.