(If you are able and willing to translate the material below into any other languages,
please contact us at the email address above.)
|
(If you are able and willing to translate the material below into any other languages, please contact us at the email address above.) |
Hello everyone,
In winter of 2005, at the U.S. IMC conference in Austin, members of the NYC IMC print team spoke about conversations that they had been having with a left-wing indie publisher in New York called Disinfo about putting together a book on Indymedia. There were a number of concerns mentioned about the project as it had been conceived at that point. After months more of discussion and reflection we've come up with a plan.
The purpose of this letter is to:
In our proposal to Disinfo we wrote: "This book would not attempt to be the definitive statement on Indymedia. Rather, it would be an overview of some of the triumphs and struggles of the network over the past five-and-a-half years. Its entries would range from dramatic, stream-of-thought, first-person pieces to more analytic chapters on the meaning of Indymedia. The book, while thoughtful, would avoid being overly academic and would be graphic/picture heavy."
We are excited at the prospect of being able to help the network begin to tell its amazing story to the world. The vast majority of the book will be original pieces written by IMC participants and friends of Indymedia with excerpted material from IMC newswires. While the book will be written in English, we want it to reflect the entire network, and so we will be soliciting submissions of material from all IMCs. In the coming weeks, we will also be sending out a questionnaire to all IMCs to find out a little about each IMC's history, current status, what issues you tend to cover, frequency of publishing, etc.
The book collective working on this project consists mostly of members of the NYC IMC print team, which also publishes The Indypendent (indypendent.org). Our research team will be seeking out material published on the newswires and other IMC publications during key moments in IMC history, but we're going to need help! Guidance on where to find great material will be much appreciated.
We want to make clear that this book will have an open submission process; everyone reading this can and should contribute something about Indymedia if they feel so inspired and should pass this on to others who may also be interested. Please see below for submission guidelines, a general outline of the book, and details on the finance and distribution plan, as well as on the rights and permissions practices for the book. Please contact us if you can help with translating this document into other languages.
After reviewing the following information, please send any questions, suggestions or submissions to indybook@aktivix.org.
Thanks for your time and consideration,
The Indy Book Collective
Outline for the Indy Book Project
NOTE: The following chapter descriptions are subject to change as people send in queries and suggestions. Submissions can tackle one or more aspects of a chapter's topic or attempt to deal with the entire subject in one comprehensive essay. Please see below for full submission guidelines.
Prologue: Excerpt from Subcomandante Marcos's 1997 statement on the need for a new intercontinental media network that enables ordinary people who resist from below to share their stories. http://www.tmcrew.org/chiapas/e_media1.htm
I. Introduction
An opening essay that touches on the significance of the Indymedia movement and places it in the
larger social and political milieu of the early 21st century.
II. History
III. Strengths, Weaknesses and Challenges
IV. Indymedia in Action: Potential Case Studies
V. Multimedia and Technology
VI. DIY
CONCLUSION
GLOSSARY
RECOMMENDED READING / RESOURCES
INDEX
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
We are soliciting a lot of different kinds of material for this
project, so the style and content of submissions will vary greatly. Please follow the guidelines of
each type of content submission. Ideas/pitches for all of the chapters outlined above are welcomed.
With all submissions, please include a short introduction about yourself and your work with
Indymedia. Submissions in English are easiest for us to handle, but we do have
Spanish and French translation capacity at this point and we should be
able to translate from more languages as we get the word out about the
project.
SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE: DEC. 1, 2006
Original Article or Sidebar
If you are interested in writing something on an idea or issue mentioned in the above outline, or on
something that you think should be included in one of the chapters listed above as an article or
sidebar, but is missing from our description or list of ideas for that chapter, please submit a
query to indybook@gmail.com before sending us a fully-written
article. The query should include the basic idea of the piece, a short explanation of why it's
important, and the approximate length you think the finished piece would be. Queries should be under
750 words. If you are planning to submit
something in a language other than English, it is especially important
that you submit a query (in English, if possible) first. Finished articles will range from 500-5,000 words, and should be fully researched and
written in an engaging, straightforward style, i.e., not too jargon-heavy, either activist- or
academic-wise. We are also exploring various Twiki-style technologies that make it possible for
interested readers to comment on drafts of articles as they go through the editing process.
Newswire Material
If you have written/posted or know of material from an IMC newswire that you think we should excerpt
for one of the chapters outlined above, please send us a sample of the text (no more than 250 words),
a brief explanation (250 words) of the context of the post and why this particular post is a strong
reflection of that event/issue, and the URL for the newswire article, if it's still online. If you
are not the author of this material, please include any contact info you have for the writer.
BUSINESS MODEL
The book's target retail price is $14.95. We can buy the books (and return any unsold copies) for
$7.50. We will set up a website for the book and ask local IMCs to put a button or some sort of
permanent link to it on their home pages.
We would sell the book through our website for $12 plus $3 for shipping and handling. All the profit, i.e., $4.50 per book, would go to Global, preferably to assist underfunded IMCs in the Global South. If we sell 5,000 books over time, that would mean $22,500 for Global. Any royalties made from the publisher's sales would also go to Global.
The publisher of the book will be Disinfo (disinfo.com), a lefty, for-profit publisher based in New York that has put out titles like: Why Do People Hate America? The Vigil: 26 Days in Crawford, Texas and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. We've approached non-profits like South End Press and New Press, but they've shown little interest. It's also been suggested that we self-publish, but upon reflection, we realized that the quality of the product would be compromised, the size of the print run greatly reduced and we would have to create our own book distribution networks from scratch.
Disinfo has offered a $12,000 advance to be paid in three installments: $4,000 upon signing the contract, $4,000 upon delivery of a completed manuscript and $4,000 upon the book going to print. Five percent, or $600, will go to our fiscal sponsor, UC-IMC, for processing. No one will be paid for any work. Photographers in the Global North will be asked to contribute their work. The only exception we are considering is paying photographers from the Global South a modest fee, recognizing they are in a unique position of having high expenses in a developing economy.
Written contributions will not be paid, but will include the author's byline. Members of the book's editorial collective will be working on an unpaid, volunteer basis. The rest of the money would go to the NYC-IMC print team to help cover ongoing media-making expenses, particularly for newspapers and poster projects.
One question, of course, is why the initial funds go to the NYC-IMC print team. The project represents an enormous burden upon our limited resources. Two of our most experienced editors and coordinators, Susan Chenelle and John Tarleton, will be devoting the next year to the project. We will need to solicit unpaid design and production work from our volunteer staff. The same goes for the content editing, copy editing, proofreading and fact checking phases. Then we need to build a website, set up a merchant account and handle all of the order processing -- all of which is also unpaid. Finally, the fulfillment aspect will be an enormous burden. Packaging, addressing and shipping thousands of books will require a huge commitment of work hours from everyone at the project. Again, no one will be paid for this work. The funds will go directly to other media-making only.
RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS
We will secure the permission for use of written material where possible, and will very much
appreciate assistance from IMCistas in contacting writers of material we would like to excerpt
from the newswires. Where explicit permission cannot be obtained, we will excerpt or quote a minimum
amount that would fall under US "fair use" provisions. We will be approaching photographers directly
to secure permission from them to use their photos. No photos will be used without permission.