Experiments in Publishing

In 1995, I was fourteen years old, and a magazine publisher. Together with my brothers Lauri and Jetro, we published a monthly magazine Savannin uutisia (News from the Savanna), named after the fact that we lived in Senegal, in the middle of the savanna. The magazine cost 800 FCFA (about 1.5 US dollars in today's exchange rates) and was sold to friends' parents and other Finnish missionaries in Senegal. At school, we had a PC with Windows 3.1 and an early version of Microsoft Works, so we could type the text and print it out on a matrix printer. After printing the text, we laid out the magazine using glue scissors. Page by page, we cut the text into suitable pieces (in the photo below, you'll see how at times, we even cut the words one by one!) and glued them on sheets of paper. As illustration, we used clip art, photos cut from magazines and our own drawings. When we were done with the layout, we took our master copy to the copying machine at our parents' work place and took a dozen or so copies of the magazine. The content of the magazine was broad, everything from current events at school and in the small community of Finnish missionaries living in Senegal to jokes and fake ads for everyday products to a beginner programming course. One of our high moments was when we interviewed our teachers who had just had a baby. At that moment, I felt like a real reporter. After five issues, we left Senegal, and the magazine with it. This didn't end my adventures in the world of publishing. I have written tutorials, blog posts and other types of articles on this blog as well as many other web sites. But I never published another magazine. Until now. Here comes the announcement: I am re-launching Insanely Interested as a publisher of very targeted magazines for the insanely interested. I am already working hard on the first magazine, Bread, with the first edition targeted for a February 2012 launch. At Insanely Interested, I also publish a new, email only blog, Creative&Curious. If you are interested to see where my experiments in publishing are taking me next, visit Insanely Interested right now. I'd love to take you on this journey with me!