The future of Reprobate Press in the age of cornoavirus.
As the Coronavirus continues to run rampant and Britain joins the countries grinding to a halt in an effort to stop the spread of the infection, we’ve had to reconsider where we are with The Reprobate.
We should have been officially announcing the release of The Reprobate‘s third edition, The Final Programme, this week. Heading to press on Monday. Sending copies out a week later. All that is now out of the window. We’ll not go into details of our personal circumstances, but we are now in the twelve-week lockdown and social distancing, fully aware that it might expand beyond that. Actually posting copies of the new book is increasingly looking impossible, particularly if shutdowns increase – we might not even be able to get it printed.
At the same time, not only are we left twiddling our thumbs at home, but we find our income streams cut off – not only in terms of print, but also via our external work, all of which has been cancelled. So we need to move forward in some way, not only to avoid going stir crazy but to try and make enough money to pay for toilet roll and other rare luxuries.
So firstly, The Reprobate: The Final Programme will be appearing next week, but it’ll be doing so via Amazon, who can print and ship. Yeah, we know. But we own enough Kindle Print books to know that the quality is up to scratch, and while it pains us to be suckling on the corporate teat, this seems the only way to get the book out there.
We’re also going to put together a couple more photobooks in the style of Now A Major Motion Picture, which will also be available via Amazon. There will be no stinting on quality, let me assure you – these are projects that we had planned already, and we’re just bringing them forward in the schedule. We think that they’ll be titles that you’ll all be excited by – but we’ll announce them once they are ready to go.
We’re aware that we are not the only people who will be taking a financial hit over the next few months, so it might be a foolish time to launch a Patreon page – but needs must, and if any of you think that your daily Reprobate doses of nostalgic weirdness, outsider art, opinionated nonsense and angry ranting are worth supporting in a financial sense, we’ll be hugely grateful. Every penny counts, as the saying goes: we don’t have any advertising beyond the odd affiliate link from Amazon and one or two other people. Funnily enough, most advertisers are rather cautious about us, and that won’t change unless we gut the site of nudity, ‘horror’, mouthy opinions and anything else that frightens the horses. We’re unwilling to do that. But The Reprobate costs us a chunk of money to run and takes up quite a bit of time. If we can actually make some money from it, then we can devote more time – ideally full time – to it, bringing you more of the stuff you love.
Among that ‘more’ will be the launch of our podcast – or possibly podcasts – and (eventually) youtube videos, where we can shout at you directly. We know that we’ve promised this before, and that pretty much everyone is now planning to fill their newly free time with podcasting, but you can expect this launching within a couple of weeks, once we have our heads around the technical gubbins. Expect a freewheeling rant about everything annoying, with your Reprobate editor, his nubile assistant and special guests all putting the world to rights while mocking the things you love.
Obviously, we are hoping that this current situation ends as soon as possible – but it seems set to run into the summer, and so we need to not only keep ourselves busy, but also retool the business accordingly. We’re not going to harass the hell out of you for support – that’s not our style and we’d rather just post this up and be pleasantly surprised if anyone decides to support us. But anything you can do – buy a book, back us or simply let us know that we’re not just pissing in the wind with our posts and podcasts – will be most gratefully received. Alternatively, if you are using Amazon to order anything, why not do so through our affiliate link? It costs you nothing but gives us a tiny bit of money, and those tiny bits can add up over time… click on the banner below.
In any case, we hope all Reprobate readers are staying safe and healthy, and we will do our damndest to continue to bring you the sort of distracting nonsense that you have become accustomed to during this difficult time.
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