Publication Spotlight: Rebecca Bloch of Unpublished Zine
ROOTED IN LOVE FOR CREATIVES AND CREATING A SPACE FOR THEM - Unpublished Magazine has established a welcoming space in the growing magazine community. With the simple intention of creating opportunities for developing artists, Unpublished has quickly found a supportive following consisting of young artists. Founded in the Spring of 2020 by Rebecca Bloch, Unpublished has kept a solid pace of content for their growing audience. Shifting gears for their fourth issue, Unpublished is working on an editorial style magazine reflective of their evolving interests and identity. Bloch gracefully manages the ever so talented Unpublished team while ensuring the magazine and their platform is always a safe space for their community and reflective of the culture.
As the year comes to a close, Unpublished isn’t slowing down anytime soon. In our chat with Bloch it’s clear they’re just laying their foundation to allow them to create bigger and better projects. Get yourself a copy of one of their magazines and read below to learn more about the mission behind Unpublished, what the next issue will look like and more.
LUNA: Unpublished is rooted in creating a space for newer / “unpublished” artists. What ultimately led to you starting on Unpublished?
UNPUBLISHED: In my high school career and even now I’m a hands on learner. I like school but I never got straight As but I always wanted the hands on experience. I had my first internship my senior year of high school and I still intern now. I love hands on experiences and as you know starting your own publication is the most hands on you can get. I noticed between high school and now being in community college that a lot of people who can relate to me got overlooked. When internships pick people they’re picking based on school and it’s really competitive so I got pretty frustrated with that. Not only with internships but also with writing opportunities because I love writing as well.
I just wanted to make Unpublished to give young writers, creatives, whoever you are, that kind of stepping stone and something to not only put on their resume, but just gain tangible experience as well.
So that was like kind of my main motive in creating this because I knew how hard it was. I went through all of that myself and I'm sure you do too. It's very competitive with just about anything, not even regarding internships. So it kind of just gives writers the resources to have a platform to voice their opinions and things that they're interested in.
LUNA: What role are you hoping Unpublished can play for this community of developing artists?
UNPUBLISHED: I just want to create a safe space where people are comfortable in sharing their work. It doesn't matter about their level of professional experience or how long they’ve been doing it for, just a place where creators can freely express themselves. Of course on applications we do ask “just curious, how, how much experience do you have?” but I think it's important to allow writers that are just starting out or people that don't have too much like formal experience within like maybe school or college to also have a platform to share their work as well, because you only get better with practice.
LUNA: You have to get experience somewhere and it feels like our generation is more understanding of that and we now want to be able to provide people that opportunity.
UNPUBLISHED: Yes! It’s like when you first started applying to internships you would look it up and people would say you need this many years of experience, and I was like, “how am I going to get this internship if I have no internship experience, because I'm trying to get an internship” you know?
LUNA: How do you feel like your personal experience with both like the creative industry and work in general have shaped the values and beliefs of Unpublished?
UNPUBLISHED: I think it's nice having the best of both worlds, because I definitely do understand it from a creative position. Then also just from the management side as well, because, I understand like writer's block, even though a lot of people say it's not a thing - I understand that it is and that sometimes people need extensions on deadlines. I think it's great because it's the same thing as the rest of my team. A lot of us like are actually artists, writers, cinematographers, etc - we are a team of creators, so we kind of do understand the struggle and relate to them on that kind of level and understand that obviously things do come up and we like to obviously take that into account when it comes to deadlines or just any work revolving around Unpublished.
LUNA: What's it been like to build this audience and community? What do you love most about at all?
UNPUBLISHED: It's really crazy considering we've only been around from the beginning of April. Sometimes I look at our stats, and I’m just like what is going on? Obviously my team and I put in so much work, so the saying of hard work literally does pay off is true. You will see results and the more time you put in, the more like you get out of it, which is so true especially in this scenario. It’s crazy because I'll also look at the demographic of how old the audience is and it's super cool because it's really a wide range. Our youngest will probably be like 15 and range up to 25, so we have a nice 10 year gap and its great because I know exactly who I'm catering to - like I'm literally catering to myself, you know? It's great because those are people my age and I love it. Especially when we connect with writers on our staff, I think that's probably like the most rewarding is seeing our staff connect with each other - I think that's the coolest experience.
I've always wanted to create a tight knit community, especially within artists and with women. Women shouldn't be breaking women down and instead women should be supporting one another - we're not competition. We're just here for support and that's the platform that I wanted to build.
LUNA: Well you've definitely done it! It's really cool to see that in real life and to be able to see those results and all pushes you forward. Regarding the team, what does your staff look like?
UNPUBLISHED: So we have different tiers, so at the top we have like our executive team; there’s five of us including me and I’m editor-in-chief, Kiara who's our Managing Editor, Ryan who's our Visuals Editor so she does like a lot of the videos we put out and a lot of edits, Joni who's our Social Media Manager, so she'll help with the copy of Twitter and captions as well. And then Lauryn who is like the shining star of it all and literally does like so much. She does our website and she does the publication - she does the whole thing, which is crazy, and she's a student still full-time and like doing her own freelance work. So that's us.
Then under us we have our editors. Each section has an editor and under that we have our staff as well of writers, graphic designers, photographers and then we have interns right now that work close with us. They’re just an extension of us because we work with them really closely.
LUNA: How have you learned to manage this team?
UNPUBLISHED: Luckily for the most part I don't have to babysit anyone or like just because we work as a collective whole and like you said, there is that mutual respect when it comes to management. Usually people are really good with responding and participating, our editors help us out a lot when it comes to that. They kind of are in charge of their own little section.
It definitely does get challenging and I’m always hounding my phone but it definitely does work because like I said we haven't had any issues and people are really collaborative.
LUNA: What's been the biggest thing you've learned over the months then with, with leading those types of teams?
UNPUBLISHED: I think probably the biggest thing I tell people is pick your team wisely. Pick people you can trust. Maybe don’t pick your best friends because you know friendship and work don't always go hand in hand. I think that's like probably the biggest advice ever is just pick people you trust. Pick people who are good at what they do and that they're able to delegate as well. What I've learned a lot is to not micromanage. If you’re gonna have a platform that has like a bunch of people working together you have to learn to kind of step back and let other people either do the work or they'll delegate the work to someone else.So I think that's also probably one of the most important things ever when growing a platform and managing it as well.
LUNA: Can you share a little bit about what the process of putting together an issue looks like?
UNPUBLISHED: I'm super, super excited for this next one specifically because the past three issues we've done, they’ve been all submission art based but this time is going to be different. We are doing more of an editorial approach to this new one with ads, articles and more interactive content. The difference between our website is that we have writers who are writing on our website versus the people that submit to our actual print. There's a lot of people that submit that I have no idea who they are, but their work is super cool.
The three zines that we have are really artistic and had art, graphic design, a lot of photography, a lot of writing, but now we've definitely switched and made a pivot to where, we're kind of rebranding ourselves right now and we want to get more editorial - kind of like what you would see at like Cosmo or just like any editorial magazine.
I love submissions, but personally I love editorial and eventually want to work in editorial. There’s a difference between a zine and a magazine - zines are a lot more creative and a lot of them have their specific niches. It's a lot more like free flowing and that's how the last three ones looked, but now we want to switch over to editorial, which is super exciting because this is our first issue and it’s kind of been a little different this time.
We're doing business ads, which I'm so excited for and I've been doing a lot of work on that specifically because I think picking the brands, and the products itself is just so fun.
This one's definitely different because the past three we've just looked through submissions and then added them in, but for New Beginnings, it's our first editorial one so it’s a different process of looking through it all. A lot of the articles that are on our website will probably also be featured in the magazine and some more ideas as well. It’s a lot more planning but it’s a lot more fun.
LUNA: Are there any key influences that are kind of shaping the style of the work that you like to curate?
UNPUBLISHED: I definitely do love keeping up with trends and that's going to reflect a lot within our next editorial issue. There’s nothing too specific when it comes to Instagram, just because like a lot of our graphic design artists are very different. Some people have a really cohesive feed and it looks great but for us, I think our feed isn’t cohesive because our artists all have very different graphic design styles, which is really great at times, and also frustrating sometimes just because sometimes I do want it to look cohesive but it’s all different. That being said it's pretty important that they're all different because we do want to highlight diverse voices and artists as well.
LUNA: What advice do you have for someone who's looking to start a zine or publication or anything like that, but they have no idea where to start?
UNPUBLISHED: That was kind of the same situation I was in. I had never been super familiar with the zine community - at school there'd be a zine club and they would make the physical zine with like scissors and glue which was different from what I wanted. It was still really cool, but they're a lot of work and talent-wise, I can not draw or do that. I went to a Zine fest in Long Beach last year before I started Unpublished with my friend and to this day I still have a bunch of them in my room. That was before I even knew what a zine was or how to make one.
So I think like the best advice I can give is to literally just do it. Any excuse, any thought in the back of your mind, that's like, “Oh, I don't know how to do this.” I literally did not know how to do anything. started out with Canva when I was on my own making graphics. The internet has so many resources and tools to just do anything. This is the best generation because literally everything is at our fingertips and if we don't know how to do something we will literally just look it up, which is like good and bad because you can become too dependent on it, but also it's so good because we can literally do anything.
I think now since the zine community has really grown, especially over quarantine, it's so easy to ask for help. I just think the biggest piece of advice is to literally just do it and don’t make excuses for yourself. To start it get a couple of friends together or open applications like I did. I didn't start it with any of my friends or anything so I really utilized the internet and Instagram when finding others to help out.
And also just like get on Tik Tok - I think that's the biggest thing ever. If you really want to get an audience and to get people to either apply or just submit or anything, think Tik ToK is the greatest platform to do that on.
LUNA: How would you like to see Unpublished expand in the upcoming months?
UNPUBLISHED: Definitely with the editorial magazines, especially with our next issue and then our following issues throughout the year. We're completely doing like a 180 where we started out as like an art submission type and now we're establishing ourselves as more of an editorial magazine, especially when it comes to rebranding and fixing up our platform and what we stand for.
I definitely want to start incorporating a lot more like Zoom events as well and creating more of an actual interactive communication between artists. It’s a shame we can’t do events in person but we still have a lot in mind for the Zoom events. We’ve gotten a lot of positive reinforcement when it comes to doing Zoom events because our staff and people really like it. So we definitely want to try to incorporate a lot of more Zoom events and just getting people connected. I think that's like our biggest thing when it comes to growth and changes - we want to continue to build this community and strengthen it by getting people face to face especially during this time. We’ve spent this past year laying the foundation down when it came to content and zine production and now we want to take the next step in furthering connections between other creators.
Submit to Unpublished’s upcoming issue: Editorial Articles / Artwork
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