narrator – a brief history
The narrator story starts in 2010 with the release of the first issue of narratorMAGAZINE Blue Mountains.
It was a dark and stormy night …
Actually, it wasn’t stormy, but it was certainly dark and cold in July 2010 in the Katoomba laneway where we had gathered to shoot the cover of Paris Portingale’s Art and the Drug Addict’s Dog. As we were wrapping up, Paris’ lovely wife said to me that she felt he should publish a collection of his short stories. My first thought was: Who reads short stories? Well, apparently, lots of people!
The wonderful thing about being in small business is that you can make a decision, and then execute it. No committees. No arguments. Screw it, just do it. (With apologies to both Nike AND Richard Branson!)
Ten days after that photo shoot, we ran an ad in the local paper, and seven weeks later released the first of five quarterly issues of narratorMAGAZINE Blue Mountains.
A year later we released the first (and only) issue of narratorMAGAZINE Central Tablelands, as part of our plan to have many regional issues across the country. What we hadn’t counted on was the effects of the GFC – getting advertising was impossible. Trying to produce two quarterly issues without funding was beyond us, so we rolled them into what would be the bigger, better, all new, shiny, singing and dancing narratorMAGAZINE NSW/ACT, with plans to bring out other state issues.
Again the GFC beat us, and in March/April 2012, we figured we were dead in the water. The decision was made to pull the plug, and then, in the dark of night, an idea floated in out of nowhere, thanks to The Sandman. And so narratorAUSTRALIA was born – as a daily online publication, supplemented by a half-yearly print on demand version.
In 2013, after the successful release of narratorAUSTRALIA Volume Two, we launched the first of our genre-specific editions, narratorEROTICA and narratorPRIDE, and our second regional/geographic site, narratorUSA. Fifteen months and several other genre and geographic experiments later, we have consolidated all our efforts into narratorINTERNATIONAL.
It makes us so happy to be able to use modern technology to adhere to ecologically beneficial practices (digital and print-on-demand publishing) to reach across the world on a daily basis and connect with so many wonderful writers.
Thank you all – readers and writers alike – for your support. Without you, the narrator community would not exist.