#could it just be me blinded by love for everything involving JM?

[fablexdreams]

I like the rdr2 epilogue, and I'm tired of pretending I don't. (I literally have never pretended. I have always made my love clear.) Is John's model questionable? Mhm. Does he look a bit too much like Arthur? Yep. Could R* have put a bit more work into it? For sure. Do I still love it, tho? Very much so. The family moments between John, Abigail, and Jack? His friendship with Sadie, Charles, and Uncle? The whispers of Arthur and Dutch in everything John is/does? R* actually showing John's struggle to leave the outlaw life behind and be there for his family instead of just pretending he became a perfect family man overnight, (like a lot of other games would have done)? John's adorably sweet and emo journal entries? It all makes up for it for me. I love the epilogue.

[jmzine]

The mods took up spaces for the contributors that could've gone to other applicants? I'm kinda disappointed with that decision...

Hey, anon. I just wanted to say I'm honestly sorry you didn't get into the zine. I am. Honestly we felt really bad about the people we turned down because we're friends with so many people in this wonderful fandom and we had to turn down some of our really good friends. But like... ten writers & ten artists is pushing the page count as it is for the fic length we're including. Believe me, if we could include everyone, we would! Our contributor list wasn't based on who was popular. I know that's hard to believe with so many big names participating, but the popular creators in fandom (as well as in professionally published works out in life) usually are popular because they are the ones who put out the highest quality or most interesting finished pieces. We didn't pick anyone because they're popular, we picked them because they're amazingly talented.

But as for the idea that mods shouldn't be in their own projects, I just want to clear something up...

Modding for a zine is a time commitment of no less than 30-40 hours per person with a mod team of 3 or 4. Think about that for a minute. Think about how much that time would be worth if it were paid on a commission rate or even at minimum wage.

Where did that time estimate come from?

Each mod went through each and every fic and art submission and graded them on a rubric scale based on style, consistency, grammar for writers, cleanliness of linework for artists, completeness of art, storytelling for writers, and other things. Then the mods came together, totaled those grades, and invited the creators who ranked in with the highest overall grades. This alone took about 12 hours of time investment from each and every one of us, including several collaborative hours where our differing timezones required very late or early days.

Next, you've got the tasks that don't necessarily require all of us at once or require only one of us.

Let's start with writing up the emails and sending out each email (including needing to send them in batches of no more than 5 at once). Then there's writing up the check-in forms for each check-in, making sure everyone submits their check-ins and that they meet the requirements, chasing down the people who don't submit, and following up. There's contacting pinch hitters in the event someone drops out. There's making sure everyone submits final works and that they're formatted right and chasing up those that aren't. This is hours of work, I'd average it to a minimum of 10-12 hours across the course of the zine.

Then there's the social media tasks of replying to asks and tweets and questions, social media outreach and promotion to drum up interest in the zine, creating the graphics to promote the zine, preorders announcements, and answering order questions from customers. Let's average 10-12 hours there.

For the formatting mod, that mod is responsible for designing indexes as well as creating, formatting, and assembling the print, PDF, & NSFW editions including the embedded linking involved in a quality PDF and formatting all of the fics to uniform formatting. This takes an average of 8 hours *per version*. That's 24 hours on the clock right there.

Now let's address production. So there's contacting manufacturers for quotes, formatting the non-zine merch for production, placing the orders for zines and merch, and buying packaging supplies. Let's say 3 hours. Don't forget to send out PDF copies, 30 minutes. Then checking and approving the zine and merch proofs and posting or sending production updates to customers, 2 hours. Let's be generous and assume nothing goes wrong and there's no delays, which never happens btw. Then there's getting the supplies, doing a quality check, and weighing out the packages for different tiers, figure 30 minutes. Next is packaging and addressing each and every order, printing and applying postage, and making sure everyone gets what they ordered. Let's assume a super lightning fast mod spends 5 minutes per order. Hopefully we'll have lots of orders, but let's figure 50 plus 20 contributor copies. That's 5.8 hours, round it to 6 hours to give 12 minutes to reload the printer and open the box of bubble mailers. Next is driving to/from the post office (let's assume the mod lives close, 30 minutes round trip), having them mail out every package (30 minutes if they already have postage on them), sending out shipping and tracking information to customers individually one by one (2 hours), and following up on any lost or delayed packages. That's a minimum of 15 hours for production.

We haven't even accounted for the actual sales. Setting up the store, announcing it, and tracking and handling the incoming orders? Let's give that five hours. Then there's calculating and tracking the budget, making sure there's enough money for everything, as well as figuring out the contributor shares and making sure we can pay for everything possible for each contributor. Three hours. And don't forget to put down a trip to the accountant because this is a for-profit project and that needs to be weighed in so any taxes that need paid are accounted for. Two hours. Ten hours there just running the store.

As you can see, this is no small investment of time. But if you still think we need to prove our qualifications and the quality and caliber of our work to justify we deserved our spots...

Mod L has been accepted into 4 other zines. Mod B has been accepted into 7 other zines. Mod K has been accepted into 29 other zines, including several with so-called "blind apps", and you can see his credentials in the sidebar of his blog. Our work is unquestionably of a zine publishing caliber.

But what's more important? This project exists because Mod L wanted to be part of a JM zine and there wasn't one happening. So we got together and made it happen and got others to join us because they love JM too. We're here because we believe in the project and the ship and we want to create something amazing. We're here to have fun and create for something we love.

We do hope that you'll continue to support this zine, and create things you love for yourself, even if you are disappointed.

If you have any more questions, feel free to reach out!

--Mod K