The Beacon

Hello everyone and welcome to the online home of Flashlight Comics!

It’s been a busy time and at the moment we’re gearing up for another push forward to appeal to educators and sponsors to publish and get Flashlight Comics into the hands of students across Canada.

A QUICK ADDENDUM: A few educators have written in asking about the status of Flashlight, which leads me to think that my original message was not clear. As of this writing, we are still waiting for funding for the first issue, and we’ll be printing and shipping it as soon as we can get financed.

Everyone involved in the project has done amazing work so far and with this latest stage of development we’re looking to educators, librarians, and other interested parties for ideas, suggestions, and help.

Essentially the work ahead falls into two categories:

• Getting more schools and libraries signed up and;

• Getting more sponsors on board with what we’re doing.

As of this writing we have over 88,490 students set to receive Flashlight when it’s published, through 760 orders comprising 3034 classrooms across Canada [see our handy map which breaks our orders down by Province].

As you can see, we’ve generated a lot of interest from the educational field [and on an extremely limited budget]. The inherent worth of the project is obvious to many Teachers and Librarians, Principals and Curriculum Coordinators across the country.

However, now comes the hard part. We’re working towards publishing our first issue in the spring, so we’re looking for an optimum number of 500,000 signups over the following weeks. This is where you can help us out the most.

Talk with other educators, and let them know what we’re proposing. Ask them to check out our company website and encourage more classrooms and libraries to sign on. We believe that what we’re proposing is of benefit to everyone involved.

We’re also looking for appropriate sponsors and our page rates are reasonable and flexible. Our criteria and our mandate are both pretty straightforward:

• We are looking for companies and organizations who share an affinity with our editorial mission to provide exceptional reading material to young readers.

• We are committed to paying good contributor rates, enabling them to earn a living wage for their work.

• We are striving to give parents the peace of mind that what we’re providing their children is safe and appropriate.

• We are giving educators a valuable tool from which to teach.

So if you have any suggestions, contacts or questions on who or how to approach a company or organization, please drop us a line.

We’d love to hear from you.

- Dave

Today was fraught with busy.

I shot off about a bazillion emails. Mostly to Greg and Jeff about the mock up. We had a little problem with respect to Greg’s burner being on the fritz and him having to FTP the files to me for placement. Might take a bit to get it done, but I should have everything ready for placement once I’m up north and I can take it to Staples for production.

I Called media companies out of Montreal and Toronto. The president of the Montreal agency was really helpful. Because they represent a lot of Quebec companies, we talked about the English-heavy content and the Quebec sponsorship policies in the education system there. Hopefully it’ll help me to refine my approach to Quebec schools.

He also gave me the names of agencies for different interests. We got talking about the fact that they’re starting to represent the Quebec Milk Board [as a possible regional sponsor] and he mentioned another media company, who handle some of the Ministry campaigns. Which is where he dropped the notion of approaching Social Services. I forgot that they do a lot of PSA’s for children. Wicked suggestion.

Additionally, he provided me with contact information for five more companies.

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Today’s topic is related to establishing additional credibility and accountability.

GRANTS:

I haven’t pursued this much lately for the following reasons:

• The circuitous labyrinth that the government has set up for their grant system is daunting. I have a limited amount of patience for clicking here, reading eligibility requirements there and finally finding out that you need to have published two consecutive issues before they’ll look at you.
• There’s Arts, Publishing, Magazine and Small Business grants, so there are actually too many to spend time reading.
• There’s a structure for Provincial vs. Federal and the two rarely meet in the same place.

Anyone who feels the urge to filter for my eligibility is more than welcome, I’ll gladly accept URL’s on this one. It all boils down to time for me. Once I find one that I’m eligible for though, I have to prepare a package for them too.

At my per-sponsor page rates, my time is far better spent speaking with “private money” people right now.

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I was on the phone and generating emails all week. It’s like the outside world is simultaneously beckoning and mocking me. After I write this, I may even go for a walk.

If I have time.

My latest concerns are legion. In point form, my task list this week has been:

• Contact all of the contributors for permission to use their work in a sample copy. I’ve gotten confirmation from nearly everyone, so I’m pretty confident that we can go ahead and lay out the rough draft of issue one! I’m totally stoked to see what the mock up will look like
• Try and reach media outlets, to inform them of Flashlight’s existence. PR cold-calling was never my strong suit. Sometimes I get flabbergasted when the people on the other end sound sceptical [I’m sure they get a lot of duds, and they need to verify between shameless self-promotion and actual news items]. Nevertheless, I persevered and made contact with the CBC and the Ottawa Sun. Next up: 4 billion other media outlets!
• Formalize the Educator Resources. I’ve gotten hold of many of the scripts to be turned into Running Records for the enormous task of levelling the text for issue one and I’ve been consulting with some terrific teachers about developing the comprehension exercises and interactive lessons. I hope to have the outline for this finished and up on the site well before we ship issue one
• Try and nail down the French content. This has proven the most interesting of all of the talent scouting that Greg and I have done. Both of us are pretty Anglo, and despite the wealth of terrific French-language material out there, neither of us has met that many creators from la Belle Province. We’re promising 18 pages for issue one and we’re still combing the hills for seven more
• Finalize design changes for the company website. Jeff has come back with some dazzling design ideas for the site and claims he has the power to bring them into existence by the end of the weekend! If anyone can do that, it’s Jeff “the Machine” Wasson! I’m really excited by what I’ve seen so far
• Develop marketing strategies that produce results. What this entailed was essentially reading a lot of hyperbole from gas-bags and whittling it down to its core information. Many Sales Specialists who post on the web or write books are often pretty fatuous. Flip-side of that: Many Marketing Specialists have a lot of really fun [and sometimes impractical] ways of describing reality
• Obtain insurance quotations for the business. This includes Errors and Omissions & Directors and Officers coverage. Unfortunately there aren’t many companies to choose from. Luckily, they’re brokerages so they’ll be looking for the best rates on my behalf
• Crunch the boring numbers. Actually, this week it seemed a lot less wretched to do this, since we were applying those numbers to the Media Kit on the website. I made a pretty nice looking rate card for advertisers so of course; I had to populate it with the most current rates, which required me to do the tedious calculations to arrive at the right figure. Once that was done, that number would get plopped into place and voilà! The end result looks pretty sweet

All in all, I’ve had a pretty cool week talking to a lot of talented and interesting individuals. Tomorrow I imagine will be a lot more of the same, but at least I’ll get out in the afternoon for a few hours. If it’s nice out, I’m even having a picnic dinner!

If you’ve read Freakanomics, you’d understand that the title is meant sarcastically. My telephone research today yielded some interesting opinions. Here are the highlights of the vox populi:

• “I’d look at getting another publisher, one with a proven track record, to produce your magazine” - [from a well-known youth marketing company, when asked for advice about enticing sponsors]

• “I can only see your publication competing for our ad dollars” - [from a well-established Children’s Educational Magazine Publisher, upon asking if they’d be interested in working on this venture together]

Mind you, these comments are taken out of context from the rest of the conversations, but that’s the impression I’m receiving from people. Which is actually good, because it means I’m going down the right track.

First, you need to convince people that what you’re doing is important.

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