Where should I make my webzine?
July 4, 2023 12:36 AM   Subscribe

I’m making a webzine with a friend. We have some, but limited, web design skills, so would like to use some website hosting platform that makes things relatively easy, such as Wordpress, Squarespace, and the like. Our requirements are simple, we’re aiming to publish four issues a year, with four stories in each issue. We’d like the website to look simple and minimalistic, with no ads. Ideally we’d like to offer the option to download the stories as epub and mobi files, but that’s not a dealbreaker. What hosting platform would you recommend?
posted by Kattullus to Computers & Internet (9 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Response by poster: Oh, and just to be clear, this would be free on the web, we don’t want it to be a subscription webzine. The stories would be on the web, and the epub and mobi files would just be an optional, secondary way to read them.
posted by Kattullus at 12:38 AM on July 4, 2023


With the fall of Twitter, there's only one place to be on the web:

NeoCities

It's free, easy to use, and run by great people. You can donate if you want but it is not required. There's also a lot of cutting edge design work going on there, e.g. https://rothda.neocities.org/Books
posted by Balna Watya at 1:53 AM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]


I think this is as much about workflow as it is about hosting service.

I'm familiar with Wordpress, and there are about a million themes available for it. Many of which are advertised as minimalistic, only some of which really are. For a website that doesn't involve a lot of dynamically generated content, just about any cheap web host will be fine. I'm on Dreamhost, and they make it very easy to get a WP site up and running, but Nearly Free Speech seems like a good cheap option.

With the addition of the Jetpack plugin to Wordpress, you can write posts in Markdown. There's also a command-line tool called Pandoc that you can run on your desktop (there's a web interface here) that is a text-format converter. It uses a flavor of Markdown as its "native language," and can convert to EPUB files. So you can write in Markdown locally, paste your Markdown into Wordpress directly, and convert your Markdown files into EPUBs, which you'll upload to Wordpress. Dealing with placed images will take a little bit of extra work and experimentation.

There is probably some clever way to script Wordpress so that your posts are automatically converted to EPUB format. I see a few Wordpress plugins that purport to do this, but have no experience with them.
posted by adamrice at 9:10 AM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]


Best answer: We built our small magazine (link in my profile) on Wix using one of their templates. I'm not sure if it was a free one or not, but it is quite spare and nice looking. We don't release the full issue at once, so the home page shows the current story, but there is an issue page. We went for a more pictorial look than a standard table of contents, again because of the way our publishing schedule works.

I didn't build it myself but I understand it wasn't too difficult and updating is quite easy. The Wix CMS definitely has quirks and annoyances, and if it were up to me I'd probably find a WordPress template and set up an installation on a different webhosting service. Among its annoyances is the lack of an RSS feed but I haven't looked into it to see whether this is something we can correct. We don't have an epub generation system.
posted by tavegyl at 9:51 AM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]


Will you be letting readers download those ePub and MOBI files for free? (In case you want to sell them, consider using Weightless Books as the storefront for that. They're open to new publishers joining right now.)
posted by brainwane at 10:35 AM on July 4, 2023


Best answer: Just a quick note: Amazon is no longer supporting .mobi files in their Send to Kindle app; they added support for epub. If you want a non-epub format for Kindle I think they now want AZW (AZW3?)
posted by TimHare at 6:51 PM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]


In case you want to sell them, consider using Weightless Books as the storefront for that. They're open to new publishers joining right now.

Note that this storefront doesn't take orders from the UK and EU.
posted by tavegyl at 2:28 AM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Thank you all for your answers! This has been very helpful.

I think Wix and Wordpress are the services that suit me best and I will explore a bit more and confer with my coeditor.

And yes, the epub files are meant to be free of charge (very helpful to know that epub works for kindles too), so we won’t need a storefront.

One final question to tavegyl:

How much control do you have over the look of the webzine in Wix? Is it a matter of choosing a template and colors, or is it more extensive?
posted by Kattullus at 2:40 PM on July 5, 2023


Response by poster: We ended up going with Wordpress. We paid an Icelandic hosting service that specializes in Wordpress, so we didn't have to go through Wordpress.com. I got some advice from a friend who's a Wordpress designer and then I built the site. Even if you have limited understanding of website design and HTML, like myself, Wordpress does make things fairly easy. So I'd recommend it. Anyway, if you want to see what our Icelandic-language short story webzine looks like, here's Stelkur.
posted by Kattullus at 2:35 AM on October 2, 2023


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