Week 2: Day 5

Friday was a pretty quiet day. I spent the majority of it in Starbucks again with workmate, Sophie. I was set quite a lot of work to do for Dia on top of having to write up the press days I went to earlier in the week.

In terms of the case study, which I have now realised has rarely been discussed in these posts, there’s a lot of development going on behind the scenes at Sketchbook.

Wafa is hoping to create an iphone app for Sketchbook and has been asking Sophie (PR) to get in touch with someone from Apple. She has mentioned that she wants apple to use Sketchbook as a ‘case study’, in other words I think she wants some sort of sponsorship. Although she has said she has found someone who would design the app for about £2000 or more. I will ask Sophie more about this and make notes.

The new issue is now available to read online, for free this time. You can also download it as a pdf for a price, as well as order a hard copy from the printers, MagCloud. I’m not exactly sure how this is helping the magazine’s future other than getting the publicity of it more hyped and spreading the word – making it more accessible to readers. But there seems to be an infinite amount of money and hard work being pumped into the publication and pop up shop, without any significant financial regain.

I want to quiz Wafa over her business plan and see how she wants to take Sketchbook further and in what context. At the moment there doesn’t seem to be a huge link between the pop up shop and the magazine. I want to see how she proposes to make money with the magazine and set up.

On another note, she has recently been granted the opportunity to publish Sketchbook the book. I think she is very much following the same pathway as Amelia Magazine’s editor-in-chief, Amelia Gregory. Amelia came to give a talk at the Pop Up Shop in my first week. She explained how she pretty much started her magazine all by herself with the help of a few friends. The magazine, which didn’t seem to run for very long and turned into more of a series of books based around art, illustration and very hippy ideology (not really my sort of thing) and is now mostly a website/ blog. It’s all a bit ambiguous and confusing as to what it’s trying to be. Unfortunately I feel like Sketchbook could easily fall into the same fate. But anyway, it would be interesting to see how Wafa deals with the book publication.