dipity. APRIL Updates & Announcements
some news for the future and updates for the month
RELAUNCH UNDERWAY
Hi all! So, after monitoring our readership levels and issue purchases both digitally and in print after no. 5, I have decided to relaunch Dipity Literary Magazine entirely, meaning our first five “legacy” issues will still be available to purchase in a few places, and we’ll be taking the zine series in a slightly different direction. This was also due to a few chats, email exchanges, and Google Meet calls I had with spaces that hold magazines over the past few months, some other factors, etc. We are not closing or anything, mostly just a content/directional shift is taking place over just our main magazine series and it will have design changes to match as well.
I know some do love our existing layout and it was absolutely a tough decision, but I think this fresh relaunch will be much better for us in the long run. There will be a new section on our website created sometime to reflect this soon. Plus one of our print providers, anyway changed without notice the availability of our issues distribution-wise—so that also affects us, however there are other print providers out there of course and we have a few back up ones still up—so its just a matter of settling on one or even preferably a new one that suits the new direction we’ll be going in. Most of the back issues may be unavailable or go out of stock eventually in some places, but they are still in the Great British Bookshop, and some will be back just on Blurbs’ server bookstore later in the year if you can’t get them in online bookstores. Everything with dipity.press chapbooks will remain the same, and our other categories will still exist for sure.
I’ll share more about the new direction and specific details once a few more things are finalized printing/planning wise that I’m comparing and waiting to hear back on at the moment—so I’m being a bit vague right now, but I’m excited for everyone to see the first new zine for our relaunch and it will tie into some of our annual revamped contests as well plus include a lot of the fun interviews and some brand new things content-wise. If you were in issue no. 5’s music section, specifically, or past ones, you’ll appear in one of the upcoming issues’ relaunched series at some point, along with others in our past recent Q&As. I have a few things design-wise prepped in advance for it, but not everything is ready to go quite yet—we’ll be doing an open call for submissions to it as well TBA. It’ll take a bit for me to get the changes facilitated on the Dipity Lit Mag series so there may be crickets for a while or some sporadicness on updates besides our podcasts and monthly interviews.
While that’s happening, we have various poetry calls open for now more so to our “Online Tank” that you can find out on our Submittable page, and a few micro-chapbooks are underway. I’d like to start up some spin-offs and anthologies as well, after the relaunch—so the series I intended to put together for our “Online Tank” section will be put on hold a bit until Dipity Lit Mag’s first new release goes out and our new micro series.
SUBFOLIO
Speaking of Submittable—just sharing I am currently deciding whether or not to pivot our reading team to a new submission management system, called Subfolio—that’ll be tested soon. I’ll send out a notice, though, if we do change how we intake subs, still up in the air, as a lot of our archival and history is with Submittable so I’m carefully deciding on this too. I recommend you check it out, though, especially if you’re an editor, publisher, or fellow magazine or journal following us.
CHAPBOOK UPDATES
We’re about 50% done with our 4th chapbook, Urban Enigmas illustrations—stay tuned! We have on average only 2-5 releases for our chapbook series per year due to budgeting, but I hope to increase this. I have seen some orders from our site on the past few chapbook releases come through—just remember, you can make an additional donation to poets directly on our website. New chapbooks can be ordered on our site a bit early. I put in a ticket to look into some issues with publication detail fields not populating elsewhere on Myths and Facts!—sometime this early April, that should be addressed, and the thinner regular bound version that goes out to Amazon, etc., should be available soon too. It looks like we’ll be doing podcast episodes on nearly every release again, but it’s optional for poets to partake in, and I’ll share those “Meet the Author” episodes out sometime this year ASAP.
JUST SHARING
I have also started a new solo personal audio diary mini-series called The Lit Mag Lab Podcast. Its available on Spotify, Apple, and soon YouTube. I may pull it into my pen name Substack or few other locations too. It just covers my experience running a lit mag, thoughts, and tips for fellow writers and artists. I also run and partake in a few other non-poetry-related podcasts, by the way, but I don’t share all of them out. So totally check it out if you’d like!
PODCAST CHANGES
Also, most of you know we have the Hummingbird Blink: Nectar Poetry podcast, considering it’s the podcast that partly led up to the creation of dipity. publications, so I feel like keeping it around TBD, as a longer video-first and announcement-only focused podcast and we discontinued one of our sister podcasts a year ago or so. So what I’d like to do probably is open up strictly an audio-only channel too, which would be our new dipity. poetry bite-sized reading podcast TBA. There is an unusually large gap on a few other podcast platforms from on Hummingbird Blink again that’s always bothered me because Spotify sadly discontinued the awesome music track adding capabilities in podcasts, and those don’t get distributed beyond their platform, so I think it’d be nice to have an additional audio-only channel submission option too, besides dipity. productions.
OTHER THINGS AHEAD
I don’t believe we’ll continue uploading poems, short stories, and interviews to the ProtagonistLit app at this time, as it appears that they’re also restructuring, too, so we’re monitoring it over the next couple of months to see what’ll be happening to their mobile platform or the future of it. We will have to look into a few other mobile apps in the future again, we are on just one then and I feel this relaunch will help us get into more spaces ultimately.
Lastly, I’m still working on brand new visuals for spoken word poetry from our podcasts, etc. So I will share those as soon as they’re done—I know our YouTube channel looks pretty empty right now, but I will complete those as soon as some of the things are settled with our relaunch. So, quite a few changes are happening, and I look forward to sharing them! Take care.
Any other thoughts, comments, or shares?
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