Hacker Monthly's Posterous

 

Hacker Monthly in Niemans Journalism Lab

Check out this great piece about Hacker Monthly on Nieman Journalism Lab (thanks, Andrew!):

Lim Cheng Soon’s story defies convention. It’s a story about the value of curation, the value of community, and, for some, the lasting value of print.

Lim is addicted to Hacker News, the popular social news site, and he wanted to solve his own problem of information overload — “to be able to go offline [entirely] and not to miss out,” he says. So he decided to start gathering up some of the most popular posts from the site and printing them in a magazine he calledHacker Monthly.

It’s gone from scratching Lim’s own itch to being a real business — one able to attract subscribers, advertisers, and money.

The story then ended up in the front page of Hacker News with some interesting comments:

From patio11

Please keep the success of HNM in mind the next time you hear "Pfft, who pays for information you could find free on the Internet." HN readers just like you also do all sorts of weird things like paying money for software, paying money for services, paying money for media, etc etc.

From grellas

This is far and away the most popular item in the reading area of our office, with many, many clients asking for copies of articles from it. It is a great product and I am happy both to subscribe and to feature it for clients. Lim has done something pretty amazing here.

All the supporters and subscribers of Hacker Monthly, I can never thank you enough.

Happy Christmas. All Issues Free Download for Everyone. 1 Day Only.

Digitalsub-2

One day only*. Choose as many issues you like from here, and click on the "FREE Digital Download" button.

Happy Christmas. :)

p.s: If you're an existing subscriber (which already has accessed to all the issues), I have something for you too: one extra month will be added to your subscription period, regardless you're on digital/print plan.

*2 days to be exact to cover all the timezones.

Comments [13]

Subscribers Now Get Free Access to All Issues

Freepastissues

If you are an existing subscriber and have logged in to your Subscriber Area in the past week, you've probably noticed this already. If you haven't logged in before, make sure you do that now. If you are not a subscriber yet, now you have plenty more reasons to sign up.

Kindle Direct Delivery for Hacker Monthly

Well, I'm happy to say that the no.1 most requested feature for Hacker Monthly is here. 

Pstam_kindle3_hn_coffee

If you own a Kindle, you're in luck. Kindle Direct Delivery lets you directly receive the latest issue of Hacker Monthly on your Kindle. No more downloading, unzipping and transferring. 

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For subscribers, simply login to the Subscriber Area, go to Settings and put in your Kindle Email Address there. Don't forget to add kindle@hackermonthly.com to your Kindle Approved Email List and you'll be all set.

 

Lucky Number 13

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Issue #13 is out. Here are a few thoughts about this latest issue:

  • Comments took a break this month. You probably knew why. Hopefully things will change soon.
  • More spacing. I experimented with more spacing for the layout this month. I love it. Let me know what you think as well.
  • Hacker Jobs stopped. I've received really good feedback from existing job posters. But lack of new job postings (and I just didn't have the time to push this) forces me to shut this down.
  • Minno -> BuySimple. Our micropayment partner raised $700k, changed name, and we make them available for the latest issue as well (previously only available for back issues). Read about the partnership here.
  • Postmark. Love the ad (pic above) and their beautiful landing page.
  • Coincidence? #13thingsilove is trending on Twitter.

Behind The Scenes: Making Hacker Monthly

This post shows you how I make Hacker Monthly. I promised my friend Jacques Mattheij (jacquesm in HN) to share this a couple of months ago, but never been able to finish the piece. Well, it's here now.

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I start with a list of Hacker News' top submissions (>100 votes) for the past months, using @newsyc100 by @jeffmiller (thank you!). I go through each articles and choose it if fits for the magazine. 

The filtering guidelines are pretty simple: no news (you don't want to read about iPad 2 release in Hacker Monthly), no blog rants, not from major publications (e.g WSJ, NYT) and not too lengthy (Hacker Monthly only has a 40+ page limits). Preferences are given to articles which are both educational and "intellectual-curiosity-challenging" (the Hacker News Mantra). 

There is no limit on how many articles are chosen at this stage (as long as it fits the selection criterias). I really take my time in the articles selection and could use up to a week for this. Sometimes when I'm not sure whether the particular article is suitable for Hacker Monthly, I sleep through it and look at it the next day again.

From all of the chosen articles, I filtered the list to 15-20 articles for the upcoming issue (the rest are deferred to the issue after or special issue), with a healthy mixture of programming, startup, design and miscellanous (under "Special" section).

Asking for permission to publish from the original author is probably the toughest part. A lot of people just doesn't have a contact form/email address listed on their website. I have my own bag of tricks when it come to searching email address (worthy of a separate post), but when all methods fail, I will just leave a blog comment or message their Twitter account. After obtaining their email addresses, I email each of the authors personally to obtain their permission, biography and mailing address (if you didn't know already, every contributing author receives a print copy + 1 year digital subscription). This takes another week.

Next, I pass the article list to one of my proofreaders. Unbeknownst to many people, every single article which appeared in Hacker Monthly are proofread not once, but twice -- the first time by a professional proofreader and the final check by yours truly. Why? Because the majority part of the magazine are blog posts and they usually are littered with spelling and gramatical errors (like the one you're reading right now).

If the article requires graphic illustration, I will work with my illustrators. We start with bouncing off ideas with each other first, followed by plenty of sketches, before working towards the finished piece. 

And finally, I design the magazine. I use Adobe InDesign for the job. This part is well covered here.

There are several tools I use to produce Digital Edition of Hacker Monthly. I use Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro to optimize it (so you could read high quality PDF with less than 10MB disk space), and Calibre to convert it into MOBI/EPUB format. I have an iPad and Kindle to test the different formats (great excuse to buy these gadgets in first place) before publishing it.

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That's about it. I keep trying to improve the process every month, like having an additional proofreader (so it's proofread thrice), and using XML publishing workflow. 

Lastly, I would like to take this chance to thank my subscribers and readers for supporting Hacker Monthly. I enjoy making it immensely. 

Startup Stories

Here's something for your weekend:

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Read it here (direct PDF link), or download the zipped digital edition (PDF+MOBI+EPUB).

Huge thanks to all the contributors and advertisers for making this possible. Hope you'll enjoy reading this and please let me know what you think afterwards (in the comment, email or @hackermonthly).

One year old, 5000 subscribers

365 days ago, I conceived the idea of doing a print magazine of Hacker News. I quickly put up a website (with nothing but an email form) and submitted it to Hacker News asking for feedback. Then, I spent the next one and a half month to release the first issue (while learning print design and InDesign from scratch).

1 year and 11 issues later, Hacker Monthly pass 5,000 subscribers*.

Thank you all.
Thankyou
*Subscriber number includes paid subscribers (print and digital), student subscribers and past contributors.

Comments [12]

Get Any Back Issue of Hacker Monthly for Free with Minno

We’ve partnered up with Minno, a micropayment provider. By signing up with Minno on our site, you can get access immediately to any one back issue (digital edition) of Hacker Monthly for free.

Signing up with Minno is painless. Simply click on the "Buy now with Minno" button, connect to your Facebook account and one more click to confirm the purchase. Just within 3 clicks and no credit card information required (screenshot below), you will be presented the download link on the same page. To borrow a popular phrase from Steve Jobs -- it just works, seamlessly.
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We will only run this offer for a limited time (depending on the response and feedback). If you like any of our back issues listed here, be sure to grab one for free now.

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