An update on the Ancient History Magazine survey
Last week, I posted that we are thinking about starting a new magazine devoted more generally to ancient history. This new magazine will be similar to Ancient Warfare, so each issue will be devoted to a particular theme, have well-written articles from contributors all over the world, and will be illustrated in full colour using photos of ancient buildings and objects (we have a vast collection of original photographs that allow us to show you stuff you’ve probably never seen before!), as well as custom artwork.
The editorial team right now consists of Jona Lendering (famous for Livius.org, the largest website in the world devoted to ancient history), Jasper Oorthuys (founder of Ancient Warfare and now managing director), and myself. The three of us have regular meetings (our last one was yesterday), and we look carefully at all the responses and comments we receive.
The Ancient History Magazine survey
So far, our survey has received a large number of responses. Thank you for that! Right now, some general trends are emerging, most importantly that, indeed, you want us to publish a general magazine about the ancient world (hurray!). Other trends are also becoming clear; for example, as far as periods are concerned, most of you prefer the Classical age, though Late Antiquity is also quite popular. But we’d love to get feedback from you to make any definite statements, so please fill in the survey if you haven’t yet. (And note that we will take your preferences expressed in the survey into account when planning our issues.)
Some of the respondents seem worried that this new magazine might replace Ancient Warfare, or wondered why we simply don’t fold more general articles about non-military aspects into Ancient Warfare. First of all: Ancient Warfare magazine isn’t going anywhere! It occupies a particular niche and is popular among our readers. It will continue in much the same way as it is now (although that doesn’t mean we won’t introduce some new stuff — indeed, a new section is being added to the magazine starting with issue IX.1, but I’ll tell you more about that some other time).
Secondly, Ancient Warfare’s strength is its particular focus on the military history and archaeology of the ancient world. Adding articles about other aspects of the ancient world would dilute what is clearly a winning formula. By creating this new magazine, we’ll finally have the necessary space to write about stuff like new discoveries in papyri, characteristics of particular buildings, political developments and social change, cultural phenomena like slavery, ancient inventions, Greek or Roman theatre, or pretty much anything you can think about. We’re pretty excited about it!
It is also clear that a significant portion of the respondents so far are not familiar with Kickstarter. I’ll post more information about Kickstarter as we draw nearer to actually launching a campaign, but for now, you can have a look at this video that explains the most pertinent bits:
Closing remarks
This was just a brief update to give you an idea of what’s going on with the survey. I’ll keep you posted here as regards further developments. And if you haven’t filled it in yet, please do! The link is:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/S2Z5NN6
If you want us to start this new magazine, we will need your support now more than ever, so feel free to share the link to the survey (or this blog post) via social media, or put it up on your website. Thanks!
