Often, when I list The Chamber in a magazine directory or a submissions engine or elsewhere, the publishers ask for a copy of a cover image. This has been problematic, because The Chamber doesn’t have a cover like a print magazine or a major online magazine and I don’t want it to. I like that people can come to the homepage and see the titles and icons for the issue’s five works (I consider the five work published on a Friday to be one issue). Not having a traditional cover cuts out the crap and takes the reader to the heart of the matter: the stories. Therefore, I created an ad hoc cover of an ancient but elegant door with the The Chamber’s name and “Slattery Publishing” at the bottom as the parent company (I have used this name in publishing my books on Amazon and IngramSpark) and placed it in the top right corner of the front page to be used occasionally as a cover. I was asked for a cover once again when I listed The Chamber with Reedsy’s Directory of Literary Magazines earlier today.

I haven’t been happy with the door cover, because it is rather boring and doesn’t really give any hint of what one may encounter in the magazine. I do like having the bit of additional artwork adding an additional bit of color to the homepage. So, tonight I created another cover to last the remainder of April and I dated it. I really don’t want to go through the effort of finding and annotating a new cover every week so I will produce only a monthly cover and I will consider the issue to cover the twenty stories/poems published in a month. This seems logical. Were this a monthly print magazine, twenty stories and/or poems would be about the right number to include in a monthly issue.

I should probably call the monthly grouping of works as a volume and the ones produced in a week as an issue. This seems a rather trivial matter to me at the moment, so I will take some time and think about it. I like the idea of using format and terminology to a degree as everyone will be familiar with the terminology and there will be no learning curve for readers. I am all for doing whatever I can to make the experience of using and reading The Chamber as easy as possible. The more one has to work at understanding what is going on, the less enjoyable the experience will be.

Therefore, the plan for now will be to produce a monthly ad hoc cover image for the magazine to use administratively to post on other website and in directories, but also to add color and beauty to the homepage.

Let me know what you think as the months go by.

–Phil Slattery, Founder and Publisher