In the publishing field, things were like a roller-coaster: amazing but also tensed, draining our energy and rocketing our adrenaline levels for the first year and a half since we founded Brain Fitness. Financial support was hard to get, especially for our literary magazine, which had 10 issues/year. Thanks to our readers and brands that helped us, we managed to edit it and organize playful events for every issue.
We published two magazines, a short stories magazine – Revista de Povestiri (in Romanian) – and a photography magazine – Love Issue (in English).
Revista de Povestiri had 16 issues in print and ebook format, Love Issue had 8 issues, 2 of them in print.
Pre-launch teaser, from March 2012:
Revista de Povestiri was the first and only Romanian short stories printed magazine and published over 100 new writers. We printed 17000 copies in total, sold at a cost of a little over 2 euros (10 lei) through our online shop and national bookshop chains like Cărturești, Librarium, Nemira, Humanitas and also in big online bookshops like Elefant and Libris. We still have around 50 complete collections for sale here.
Since we stopped publishing the magazine (burnout and lack of funding), our fan base did not shrink, understanding our shift from publishing to education. We now have over 11000 Facebook fans and we plan to satisfy their expectations with engaging content.
We recently decided to resume our editorial activity in the literary field online, on revistadepovestiri.ro. We will publish here the best short stories selected by our creative writing trainers at the workshops we organize and in national contests 4 times /year.
Find out more about Revista de Povestiri and see the photo gallery on the project’s page.
Imagination mascot
We like character development and this is why we created Motanov Motanul Mov (Motanov the Purple Cat), a quirky, humorous and friendly cat people loved interacting with, who even traveled to Mongolia and Kilimanjaro. Motanov used to live inside Revista de Povestiri, write a story in every issue, select stories from readers and have imagination trainings every day on his Facebook profile, since January 2012. (He became lazy a year ago, but he’s preparing his comeback.) He also writes our newsletter with great success (people enjoy it and reply) and gives online feedback to readers who send him their short stories.
Find out more about Motanov and see the photo gallery on the project’s page.
Best Of – failed project
We launched a campaign on a Romanian crowdfunding website to gather funding for editing a best of issue of Revista de Povestiri, translated in English. With no significant success, unfortunately! It was November 2012, maybe a little too early for crowdfunding in Romania.
LGBT Supplement
In February 2013, we published a free digital supplement with LGBT stories selected from the readers through a special contest, in support to the Month of LGBT History, an annual event organised by Accept NGO. You can read the supplement here.
Interviews about our publishing work
