I like to support indie ventures by creative people. I have a long history of hooking up new publications and such, because I feel like that gives back to the community. The downside of helping new projects is that sometimes the people running them have no track record, so it becomes difficult to separate the good and earnest people working uphill from the profiteering scumbags looking for free labor.
So here is the situation:
New magazine has done a sort of sample issue, but no real issues have come out yet. A guy who claims to speak for the mag asks me for a variety of images with very particular specifications. I have a nice chat with the guy and decide to hook him up. He keeps asking to look at more pictures and kind of seeming to want the opposite of what he described. I finally point this inconsistency out and he tells me he is ranked by some other editor who vehemently disagrees with him on most points. So he is basically giving me the excuse that he has to run it through corporate and we are talking about a small zine here. I tell him he needs to put me with the decision-maker then, so I can supply what that person wants and stop going around in circles and using up my resources scanning and printing film just because he feels like looking at my photos.
The upshot is that they take up more of my time going over image after image than ANY other magazine has ever done for a layout that size. One of the reasons magazines love me is because I am really efficient and fast when editing photos. I’ve had many hundreds of pages of my work published and I mean editing in the traditional sense i.e. picking the right images for an article or other specific need. I offered this zine first run images to their specifications. They finally pick out all previously published images which meet almost none of their specs and ask if they can use those. I let them. For free.
Now, my standard deal with people who model for me is that I like to give them a copy of any magazine an image I’ve shot of them appears in editorially. This means that I always request copies of any magazine my work is going to appear in. On a few rare occasions when magazines did not send me copies, or more commonly did not send enough, I have purchased copies for myself and the models, but that is not an option for this zine as it does not have newsstand circulation. It appears that they have done a more interesting layout with their weird photo selects than I expected, so I’m looking forward to seeing the magazine.
So supposedly this magazine comes out. They certainly make a big deal of sending out PR getting to attach my name and Forrest Black’s to the issue. Which is fine. Except then they try to coerce me into going to some release party for the magazine out in the boonies, a party they will not even be at. They tell me there will be copies of the magazine at this club, if I go. I enjoy doing charity work for the scene, so I make time for it, but I’m really really busy. And I just kind of think magazines should send copies to contributors.
So weeks go by and no magazines show up, but the editor says she has given copies to a couple of the people who appeared in it. She asks me if I want to meet up with some random person in Los Angeles to get copies. I’m kind of stunned that she is trying to waste more of my time, when the Post Office is not exactly hard to use to send a magazine from Point A to Point B, but it is moot because the person she says is in Los Angeles never contacts me.
So, if I believe the magazine came out when they said it did, a couple of months have gone by without the magazine sending me copies for me or for Forrest or for the models. I send reminders via email, MySpace, and AIM. Here is my most recent AIM to the guy who initially contacted me:
Me: heya, do you have any idea what the holdup is on getting contributors copies of [Magazine Name Censored]?
Me: You seemed cool when we chatted before, so I’m disappointed to not have even heard from you. If the magazine came out when said, then it is crazy for featured models and photographers who didn’t get paid or anything to not have copies yet. That is such a small thing to ask and it makes me look bad when I can’t deliver copies to the people in my photographs.
[Name from Zine Censored] signed off at 11:47:02 PM.
So what would you all make of this? How should I react?