Poetry Forum

Hi all,

I'm delighted to reveal that I and a friend are launching a new on-line poetry magazine called Antiphon. We aiming to publish on-line four times a year with the possible aim of a pdf or hard copy at a later stage. We think there's an opportunity for a good on-line UK-based magazine, and that this is probably the way mags will go - it's much easier to find an appreciative and wider audience than most small magazines can achieve. Getting published in the best of magazines can seem to be a bit of a lottery so we thought we'd widen opportunities just a bit.

I'd be very pleased if you'd come along and give us your support (we've got a discussion forum for any poeticy thoughts) and try sending us some submissions. It's partly the work I've seen here that's encouraged this idea, so give us a go!

cheers,

Rosemary

http://www.antiphon.org.uk/

Good for you.


J.

p.s. Once you go to the Forum you are locked into a loop and the backbutton stops working. A bug perhaps?

Well done Rosemary, nice looking site. Good idea having a forum attached.

Looking forward to seeing the first issue.

Nash.

John, thanks. I haven't found that problem - will see if others find it.

Nash, I'm relying on you all to make that first issue happen!

Ros

Very stylish it is too! Well done Ros, wishing you every success.

(wording of first paragraph, first page is a bit dodgy though . . .)

B.

Thanks, Brian. All handcrafted by me, so I'm to blame... what's dodgy?

Antiphon wrote:We think there’s a gap in the market for a really good online UK poetry magazine. It’ll publish a wide range of well-crafted, skilfully written poems, and not limit itself to any particular form or style: just exciting poetry. Hence our new magazine, Antiphon.

It's that "It'll" at the start of the second sentence.

I'd have preferred:

We think there’s a gap in the market for a really good online UK poetry magazine. One that publishes a wide range of well-crafted, skilfully written poems, and doesn't limit itself to any particular form or style: just exciting poetry. Hence our new magazine, Antiphon.

Or some such . . . sorry to quibble!
Details, details . . .

B.

Excellent, Ros. Good for you and your friend, and best of luck with it. Great title too. (Had to google it!)

Cheers

David

Thanks so much for our first submission! (who will remain anon for now!)

Excellent, simple but slick design.

Although - "We think there's an opportunity for a good on-line UK-based magazine" Seems somewhat naive, when infact there are hundreds of them out there...many pretty slick!

Hopefully the backing of PG will be a boost, it's a hard old game.

Have you looked into the SEO side of things, promotion etc? There are many FREE and relatively simple ways of promoting your site, hopefully you've got that nailed?

A quick SEO aside - The site is built on the Joomla platform, if you "view source" you'll see you have no meta tags relevant to your website:

<meta name="keywords" content="joomla, Joomla" />
<meta name="rights" content="All content copyright. Copyright of individual poems remains with the author." />
<meta name="author" content="Administrator" />
<meta name="description" content="Antiphon poetry" />
<meta name="generator" content="Joomla! 1.7 - Open Source Content Management" />
<title>Home</title>

The title tag is of the utmost importance. At present you have <title>Home</title> It really needs to be - <title>Online poetry mag</title> or words to that effect.

These need addressing forthwith!

I'd be happy to advise on the simple aspects of SEO.

Kris

Kris, I suddenly get the urge to hug you. I'd love some advice on that sort of thing. I've gone from knowing no Joomla to doing all this in about 3 months, and I'm aware there's a lot of things I'm still very hazy on. I'll pm you.

Ros

camus wrote:Seems somewhat naive, when infact there are hundreds of them out there...many pretty slick!

I don't think we'd go into this if we weren't naive and probably daftly optimistic.

I'd be interested to hear about some of the competition you've found out there - apart from Snakeskin, I couldn't find many good UK-based online mags. There are some good Australian and US ones, and some devoted to specifics - haiku, 14 lines, etc. but I was hard pressed to come up with anything (that seemed live) that was doing what we're trying to do.

Ros

Ros wrote:

camus wrote:Seems somewhat naive, when infact there are hundreds of them out there...many pretty slick!

I'd be interested to hear about some of the competition you've found out there - apart from Snakeskin, I couldn't find many good UK-based online mags.

That's what I was thinking too. And why do all the luddites who run print magazines refuse to take email submissions? Sounds like a perfect way of restricting your input to the green-ink brigade.

Well I came across quite a few a while back when I was doing research into some mind numbingly dull php coding. That said I'm probably talking from a design point of view! Content and functionality - you are probably right. As David said, the lack of email submissions is rather ridiculous. Although this does point to the fact that they fear a influx of submissions that they can't handle and keep it to snail mail submissions purposefully? All hail the clost poets!

RE the SEO side of things - I'd be happy to guide you through the basics, as mentioned Keywords and meta-tags are the starting point. Then you should concentrate on getting some high PR (page rank) rated incoming links to your website. Also make use of google tools, get yourself on google places, start making use of the new google +, get yourself social networked up. Facebook page, twitter, linkedin. These aren't just social trends, they actually work very well to spread the word. That said I'm tendering for a website at the moment, a flooring company, I mentioned social networking, his answer "Fuck all that trendy nonsense" I didn't pursue the matter. But for a website of a poetic nature, social networking is perfect.

Finally I don't actually use Joomla, I use Wordpress as my open source CMS of choice, but they are similar in that they both include plugins, millions of them! I'd recommend looking into SEO plugins for joomla.

Anyhow I've now bored and blinded you with science, go at your own pace and l'll help if I can.

cheers
Kris

http://extensions.joomla.org/search?q=seo

The above link should be useful.

Thanks, Kris. I've set up the title tags now (not that that was obvious!) and we do have a facebook page (search for Antiphon) and a twitter account (check out AntiphonPoetry) though to be honest, apart from saying 'we're live! send us stuff!' I'm a bit at a loss as to what to say... I'll check out the seo plugins. I think mostly we need to become known and get some links going. One thing we're keen on is talking about the pamphlets and books produced by all the small presses, so I'm hoping for reciprocal advertising there.

The reason we chose Submishmash for submissions is that it's a good compromise between snail mail (too much effort all round) and an open email address (all the greetings card ditties you'd ever want). It takes a bit of effort but not too much.

Ros

Agree with Kris on the SEO side there is a basic helpful automatic SEO grader available here http://websitegrader.com/ which can provide good advice to boost your rankings.

Ros wrote:
I'd be interested to hear about some of the competition you've found out there - apart from Snakeskin, I couldn't find many good UK-based online mags. There are some good Australian and US ones, and some devoted to specifics - haiku, 14 lines, etc. but I was hard pressed to come up with anything (that seemed live) that was doing what we're trying to do.

Ros

Just come across this. Mostly US-based I think, but still, could be of interest to some.

http://flavorwire.com/130307/10-online- ... be-reading

Must say, reading through the list of on-line magazines at The Poetry Kit site, Antiphon sounds pretty superior to everything else on there! Good stuff!

B.

These look pretty good, first one especially:

Salt

Fleeting

Neon

Stop advertising the competition

How did you find those? I haven't come across them before, except Salt, which is Australian, and is publishing 'famous' poets, so we're not quite in that league yet.

Ros

I've been in Fleeting. It's one of the quirkier and edgier ones. Good fun journal.

Fleeting has a good reputation I think. I've seen John McCullough (a local Brighton boy - I'm going to see him read tomorrow night) in it.

http://www.johnmccullough.co.uk/

We've added up properly, and we had around 500 poems submitted.

So you can probably understand why I haven't been around critting much on PG...

Ros

Great idea. Very slick as well!