In Queer Love: Our Little Magazine

In Queer Love was actually coined as a valedictorian phrase from “Inquilaab”. It was supposed to be used as a closing compliment or salutation after a letter.

This little magazine is thus a letter. A love letter to the community and the creators. If you have been part of the publishing industry in any way, shape, or form, you are already aware of how predatory the industry can be towards the creators. We believe, at it’s core, it is a labour issue. In India, there is also the added baggage of casteism, where creative arts were always seen as a lower caste entertainment form. Not only that, since the advent of printing technology in India, the task of creating art, layouts, typesets, and illustrations were always delegated to lower caste people. Thus, providing fair pay for artists was never part of the conversation at all. Some Indian publishing houses keep as much as 95% of the revenue.

In Queer Love is an experiment to see if we can shift this practice and provide fair pay and ownership to the artists and writers. We don’t charge anything from the authors and artists. We provide 10 INR to each published contributor per copy sold. The pricing of each issue thus takes into account the number of authors. We add in the publishing house overheads, which includes the infrastructure, management, production, and distribution of the magazine. And lastly, we add the material cost of printing for each unit.

We as a publishing house, believe that 70% of the net profit should go to the contributors. Pricing Model for all of our products reflects that. We keep roughly 25% of the profit from each copy sold, and that is used to pay for the websites, editors, and designers.