How I Harnessed Flickr to Get Mad Submissions
When Professor Emerson told us we had a little over a month to get enough submissions to fill up the inaugural issue of our online literary journal, I was a bit overwhelmed. The online literary journals we’ve looked at in class, like Blackbird and Drunken Boat, have around 30 to 50 works per issue. And since it’s very unlikely that they elected to showcase every submission they received for the issue, it’s likely they had around 60 to 100 individual submissions. Now where were we, an unknown student inaugural journal, going to find 100 people to submit their photos, art, sculptures and film to us?
The answer turned out to be Flickr, an image and video hosting site that serves as a networking community for photographers. Anyone can set up a Flickr profile, from a Parisian fashion photographer who wants to host her portfolio to a mom in Illinois who wants to post pictures of her kids. In fact, even I have my own Flickr site, laureninspace, where I post pictures of my knitting, daily outfits, and anime conventions I attend. Overall, millions of users host more than three billion photos, according to Flickr’s latest figures.
The way Flickr works is that you first sign up on Yahoo (their sponsor) and get a name and password. Once that’s done, you can upload photos (100 MB a month with a free account), network with friends by clicking “add” on their profiles, add photos you like best as “favorites,” and even invite users and photos to join groups on a theme like “Paradise: Pictures of the Islands” or “Photographers in Fredericksburg.” If you want to invite a person to a group who doesn’t speak the same language, Flickr translates your invite to one of eight languages it supports. Flickr also has a search engine that allows you to look up photos by group, photographer, subject, tag, location it was taken, or something called “interestingness,” a Flickrism which refers to how much attention the photo has received from groups and users in the past week. (For a full description of Flickr, check out their Wikipedia page).
So how does this factor into Pendulum Journal? What we did was set up a Yahoo name and password for the journal as if it were a person. Where the person’s profile and interests would be, we explained who we actually are. We also made sure to include a link to our website and submission email. Then we all took turns signing in as Pendulum Journal, looking for people to friend and photos to favorite on Flickr. (Figure 1.1)
Fig 1.1 – Pendulum Journal Profile Page
Fig 1.2 – Pendulum Journal Submission Pool
But this wasn’t enough. Next, we had Pendulum Journal create its own group, Pendulum Journal Submission Pool (Figure 1.2). Once again, our mission statement and the type of submission we were looking for became the info paragraph for the group. We went back to our favorite photos and invited them to the group by commenting underneath them with a link. (Flickr provides this opportunity; if you have a group, it gives you the option when commenting to invite a photo to your group (Figure 1.3).) Since our group was invite only, we could supervise who became a group member and submitter. If a person asked to join the group that we hadn’t invited, we could first look at their profile before deciding to say yes or no.
Fig 1.3 – Group Rules
In order to make this work, we put in place two very important precautions. First, we notified people that if their work was in this pool, it was automatically considered a submission to our literary journal. The way we made this mandatory was by making it a group rule on the group set up page. By enabling a rule, this meant that users would have to click “I agree” in order to join the group (Figure 1.4). This way, people wouldn’t be surprised when we informed them we would be featuring their work on our website. Secondly, thanks to a reminder by Jim Groom, we realized we had to assure people that we would not be taking up copyright of their work, which would cut down on the number of professional submitters. So also on the rule page, we put this notification: “If you submit your work to our group, you will continue to own the copyright of your own work.”
Fig 1.4 – Group Invitation
The result was 50 submissions of art, craft, and photography in 3 days. At this rate, we’ll have no problem reaching 100 before the month is up. Flickr is the most advantageous social networking site for any literary journal to join since it’s the most direct: unlike other social networking tools which focus on sharing profiles, Flickr’s focus is on sharing the artwork that literary journals are looking for.
One Comment
- John Bowers replied:
Very interesting. Flickr seems like it was designed with online journals in mind. BTW I thought you changed the name from Pendulum. It sounds like Dr. Emerson is going to be very impressed by your first issue.
March 1st, 2009 at 9:27 pm. Permalink.