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 First Anniversary
by Alice Korach
With hardly anyone noticing it, BeadBugle.Com has turned into a real beading magazine over the course of the past year. In fact, a year’s worth of the Bead Bugle has as much or more valuable and interesting content as a year of any of the print magazines. It’s one of the best-kept secrets in the beading world.
When I left Bead&Button and joined BeadBugle.Com last July, it was a fun read with quirky but always interesting content. It came out whenever Bill and Tonette had time to give to creating a new issue – not too often. It’s hard to run a business and make a magazine on a regular schedule.
Since 1993 (when I started Bead&Button), my mission has been to spread the joy and fulfillment of beading as widely as possible. We still have a long way to go. As long as people are cruel or intolerant of their neighbors, not enough people are beading. Very few beaders have time to be aggressive or hateful. There are so many beads and so many things to do with them and so much to learn from other beaders. Every new skill, every completed project, every special bead added to the hoard gives beaders a rush of happiness, a sense of fulfillment, the pride and pleasure of creation, and the desire to show and share with other beaders. My dream continues to be a world filled with people who are beaders or share the qualities of beaders. It won’t be accomplished in my lifetime, but I feel driven to continue working toward that utopia in the only way I know how – by turning as many people as I can on to the joy of beading.
Leaving B&B was difficult; it had been an excellent vehicle for spreading beading all over the globe. Joining BeadBugle.Com has been incredible. I’ve brought the things I know best to the Bugle:
- Clear, precise editing and well-written English (it ought to be well-written; I have a Ph.D. in English literature and 13 years of teaching writing, literature, and technical writing in my past)
- Accurate and copiously illustrated projects in a wide range of bead and jewelry areas
- Enthusiasm for anything bead related
- A voracious desire to learn new things and to share that knowledge with the world of beaders
- Love and respect for all my sisters and brothers who also love beads
- And I’ve learned more than I ever thought possible with no end in sight.
Advantages of an online magazine
The last person I ever expected to embrace the web wholeheartedly was myself. I love books and printed matter. But the longer I’ve been with the Bugle, the more excited I become about the web and online publishing.
Timeliness -- With the web, there’s no four to six month lag time between editing a project and seeing it in print. And if, heaven forbid, there’s an error, it can be corrected immediately!
Global access -- The most exciting thing for me about being part of an online magazine is the wealth of information we can bring you from all over the planet. You may have noticed the exciting series of projects we’ve been publishing by Tatiana Zharakova, who lives in Russia. Tatiana e-mails me drawings and whatever text she has, and I analyze what she has done and explain it in words and with process photos as I work through each project. Russian beaders don’t work common stitches quite the same way as American beaders, and through the magic of the internet, we’re able to bring you a different take on beading. We’re also getting a lot of designs from Australia and New Zealand, and Laura Schiavoncini’s Italian approach to design is a fresh, new concept for many of us.
As the Bead Bugle grows, there will be more and more input from afar because we are not limited by the restrictions of national borders and customs duties and because I love the challenge of understanding and explaining unfamiliar stitches and applications.
PDF professional layouts -- Of course, we are aware that you don’t want to lug your computer to the bead store to shop or sit in front of your monitor to bead, so as soon as we were able to, we added state-of-the-art layout and design software. We’ve been laying out all the projects and articles in a professional, and printer-friendly format since early spring.
Unlimited space for illustration -- From the very beginning of B&B, I was frustrated by the limitation on the number of photos and drawings I could have in each project. Many of you, like me, bead from the pictures, not the words, and the more pictures you have, the more accessible the information is – especially to non-English speakers (think of all those wonderful Japanese magazines and project books). But with a paper magazine, you have to keep articles tight in order to have a decent variety – the number of editorial pages is determined by the number of ad pages -- and each photo is costly to produce at every stage of the process, so the number is necessarily limited.
With an online magazine, space is not an issue. If I think a photo or drawing would help to make a step clearer, I take the picture and put it in. Of course, each picture takes time to shoot and Photoshop, but Bill and I each stay up a little later to make it happen.
Subscriptions to BeadBugle.Com
Some people complain that the projects in the Bead Bugle are not free – that they have to subscribe or buy each one individually. But I’m very confused by this attitude. No one complains that they have to pay for a printed magazine or downloads of previous projects from a printed magazine, and all they get for that subscription fee is the magazine.
In addition to free downloads of all PDFs (projects and stories), Bead Bugle subscribers get access to four different ways to promote themselves or their business for free. Plus they get an extra 10% discount on purchases from BeadBabe.com, which is already one of the most economical bead stores in the USA. It’s easy to recoup your subscription fee several times over in a year’s worth of bead buying or increased traffic to your site or both.
The advantages of subscription seem so obvious to me that I find myself in a time warp. I’m back in 1994 wondering why only a small percentage of the people on dedicated bead lists are subscribing when I expected a majority of them to jump on board. “Patience, Alice,” I tell myself, “keep building the best bead magazine, and the beaders will find it.” So that’s what we’re doing.
We hope you’re finding lots of things to please, inspire, and educate you. We’d love to hear from you: What do you most enjoy? What would you like to see that we’re not giving you? How can we make your time visiting the BeadBugle more fun and more rewarding? You don’t have to be a subscriber to submit a project or a tip for publication, so please consider sharing your work with the bead community (and getting paid for it). And then subscribe so we can show everyone your most wonderful creations!
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