The one-woman editorial board of 400 Words, a CD-sized magazine conceived in 2005, has called it quits. 29-year old Katherine Sharp faulted the magazine's surprise celebrity, the subsequent "logistical issues" of a large-scale print product and the quagmire of dealing with distributor Ingram. After getting raved about in McSweeney's and Newsweek, (as well as a review I wrote in New Pages), Sharpe boosted distribution nationwide. Alas, the business headaches of producing a print journal began to handicap everything else it took to make "the short-short memoir for a busy world."
Contributors, who were listed by their first name and age, told thier autobiography in under 400 words for the first issue, then obsessions and compulsions in the second issue. It wasn't a literary journal; it was moments of life laid bare by words, open to any person with a story to tell, which is everyone. It was one of the most exciting yet simple concepts in years and we're sorry to see it go, epecially under distributor duress and the irony of success.
From her seemingly reluctant farewell, here's Sharpe in her own words:
"What can I say? When I started 400 Words, I had no idea what would happen. I was a small-town graduate student looking for a way to feel more creative, and to indulge a lifetime’s interest in zines, publishing, storytelling, and other peoples’ secret inner lives. Realizing that I could get people to entrust me with their stories was unbelievably cool. That the stories themselves were so interesting was wonderful. A little bit of media attention for the project felt great.
Being picked up for distribution by Microcosm was a great coup. The handful of times that I ran into someone who already knew about 400 Words from elsewhere was such a kick. On the other side…the article in Newsweek led to being approached by Ingram, the biggest periodical distributor. Could this be 400 Words’ leap into the big time?! Unfortunately, the small trim size of the books (they are six inches tall or whatever) meant that they would literally disappear into standard magazine racks, which led to Four Hundo’s rejection by Borders and Barnes & Noble. I thought briefly about changing the format of the magazine in hopes of being picked up by the big chains, but decided against it for a handful of reasons. More limited distribution by Ingram didn’t go so well. I spent several hundred dollars on a proprietary code that all periodicals need to have in order to be distro’d by Ingram, and another several hundred to initiate my account with Ingram. They ordered a few hundred copies of Issue 2, and I sent them off. Because the bar codes on the front cover were non-functional, the books needed to be specially stickered, at a cost of 25 cents per; I haven’t seen a stickered book but I suspect it made them look unappealing. The only thing I’ve received back from Ingram is a ream of printouts detailing a copy returned here, two copies returned there. I haven’t gotten a dime, and at this point I don’t expect to. We were a bad fit, and I probably should have gone with SPD, or something, if I wanted to get more heavily into third-party distribution. Or just stuck with Microcosm and concentrated on putting out a good zine once a year.
But that’s not what happened. When I started 400 Words, it was really important to me to have a physical product: not just a web thing but little books that people could flip through, smell the ink of, put their hands on. Doing it twice was unbelievably fun. I recommend it to everyone. But there are also logistical issues with physical products that you just don’t face with internet-only affairs: per-unit production costs, shipping, the inability to make changes once you’ve committed to a print run, getting your orders out to the post office, and last but not at all least, where to store all your cardboard boxes full of stock. I loved it, but it was a real operation, and as a one-woman show which at a certain point seemed likely to remain a hobby, albeit an awesome one, it got to be a bit too much."
400 Words is yet another victim of the publishing business model. There has got to be a better way to get books into the hands of readers. Thanks, Katherine, it was a great book.
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