Our Contributors Deserve to be Paid.

And We Have a Plan to Make it Happen.

Panel & Frame has only been around for a month or so, but in that time, we’ve steadily grown, and published some of the best content on Medium. We’ve cajoled, scraped, and prodded our creative friends into sharing their yet-to-be-published works, sifted through our related tags to discover authors with gripping, insightful, personal voices, and gained thousands of views. If you’re subscribed as of this letter’s publication, you’re one of the first 50 to join us on this publication’s journey- and, if our trend of growth keeps up, you are just the beginning.

I’d like to take a moment to thank you, whether you’re a writer or a reader, and to get you excited for the next step.

We want to bring Panel & Frame from the digital realm into the physical one- in the form of a beautiful, monthly, curated print magazine collecting the very best in Comics, Literature, Film, and Art- and writings about those things. Imagine it- every month, a 50-plus page collection of short fiction, innovative comics, insightful film criticism, and interviews with independent producers of said content, wrapped in a display-worthy cover designed by an up-and-coming visual artist. Oh, and to keep with our love for the medium of comics, it’ll be sized just like an issue of a comic book, with a thick, matte protective cover.

Not to mention, each and every contributor to the print magazine will be paid at a rate directly tied to the number of issues sold, the number of pages their content covers, and the type of content they provide.

These days, it’s hard to make a name for yourself while thousands of other creative voices are shouting for attention, and the ephemeral nature of online content drowns your work in a deluge of newer, but not necessarily better, posts. We want to provide a publishing space that is immediate and personal, but permanent and tangible. We want to welcome voices who have something important to say, and give them the freedom to say it in a way that will last. And we want to reward those voices with a direct cut of the profits, while bringing a physical product to our audience at a price that is almost inarguable in its affordability.

If printing costs hold, we can do 50 pages a month for 5 dollars at the point of sale. Two of those dollars will cover the cost of printing, two and a half will go to the contributors, and the remaining 50 cents will go to us for the costs associated with collecting, organizing, and promoting the magazine.

We’ve crunched the numbers, we’ve done the research, and we’ve made some of the contacts, but we don’t have nearly the support we’re going to need to put the whole project together. We have a soft deadline for ourselves- October 1st, 2016- to produce our first issue. That’s just a few days short of a year from our founding. Until then, we’re going to focus on growing our audience, getting the details together, and setting up a pipeline to make the whole process possible.

That’s where you come in. As contributors and subscribers, we need to tap into your reach if we’re going to start building the foothold and reputation that will make a print magazine possible. This is a big ask, but you can help us right now, in just a few moments, by doing any one of the following:

1: Recommend this story, and let your Medium followers know about our plan.

The simple click of that little heart will get us in front of more eyes that are already on Medium, and tell us that you’re ready to support us on this crazy journey.

2: Follow us on Facebook, and make a post to your friends about our mission.

Facebook can be a tough place to advertise, but it’s the most immediate way to get the people who know and care about you on board with something you want to promote. Twitter works, too!

3: Create content for the publication- or connect us to creators who need a platform!

The most important ingredient in this whole thing is the content. If you, or someone you know, creates content in Comics, Literature, Film, or Art, we want to publish it. We can be contacted via email at [email protected] to discuss the submission process with anyone not yet on Medium.

That’s it for now! Thanks for reading, thanks for contributing, and thanks for your continued support! Let’s continue to build a space where emerging voices in Comics, Literature, Film, and Art can find an audience!

-Brad Decker, Editor and Co-Founder