Just thought I would take a minute to write about the experience of putting the Journal together.
When I initially decided to pursue this project, I did so for a few reasons. The first was the need. There are very few high quality publications dedicated to Ancient Numismatics and as far as I could tell, there were no quality newsletters or journals being produced “online”.
The second reason was to exercise my writing skills. It has been almost 15 years since I had to write something besides a brief letter, post, email or a technical paper or press release for my telecommunications business.
It has been a lot of fun, but it has also been a lot more work than I was expecting. I was discussing it with a friend earlier today. He could not understand how each issue was taking me between 50 and 100 hours to complete. So I ran off the list of things that had to be done (the following does not include the changes made to the website design and HTML programming):
1. Approach potential authors and authors that agreed to submit articles. Go over proposed submissions. (2 Hours)
2. Proof read all submissions, edit and in the case of one submission by an author whose primary language was not English, I had agreed to “heavily” edit the article on his behalf, data entry for articles submitted “hard copy’, etc. (A good 10 hours here)
3. Edit/clean-up all illustrations in photoshop, find illustrations where required, interact with author on which illustrations they prefer and create/add captions to all photographs, get permission to use photography. (A good 17+ hours)
4. Layout the articles in Dreamweaver, incorporate illustrations, send draft to authors and go back and forth correcting minor errors, layout issues, etc. (A good 17 hours)
5. Find news for “Ancients in the news”, summarize and incorporate into an article. (2 Hours)
6. Create Index for issue, create thumbnail images for each article, write summary of each article, etc. (4 Hours)
7. Write my articles. In this case, the reviews, which was relatively quick- layout, etc. (3 hours)
8. Proof read all articles, check all links, view in two different browsers. (2 Hours)
9. Modify HTML layout for email of journal, test and send to mailing list. (3 Hours)
10. Post various announcements, follow-up with authors, etc. (2 Hours)
Total time: 62+ hours
Granted, it will take me less time the more familiar I become with Dreamweaver and Photoshop, or whenever the Content Management System I am having programmed for me is completed. But I now have a new found respect for those that have to produce a publication monthly. The next time I hear someone complain about spending $36 for an annual subscription ($45 Canada and $75 to the rest of the world) to the Celator they will get a lecture from me!
Speaking of which, I strongly encourage anyone that has not done so already to subscribe to the Celator. It is well worth the $36 per year for a monthly publication. You can subscribe here.
