Q: How does a print-only publication create awareness in an online world?

A: Well...

Aug 13, 2025

One of our earliest decisions about slips slips was to make it available only in print. The experience of reading it would only occur in physical time and space. We would avoid billion-dollar algorithms to share the thoughts and images and stories of our contributors directly, with a minimum of technological innovation. Every issue of slips slips that’s currently out in the world has been put there by human hands - either by dropping off a stack at a brick-and-mortar venue or lovingly packed into an envelope and shipped through the U.S. mail.

But I mean, we’re not naive. We knew that the experience of publicizing, soliciting material, and communicating with readers and creators would inevitably have an electronic component. Some degree of participation in our dark, digitally-mediated technocracy is inevitable - after all, it’s not like we laid out our first issue by cutting up and gluing together manually typewritten pages. As for the Internet, it can help guide people to us, but we’re ultimately a grassroots, word-of-mouth undertaking - even if, yes, you’re reading these words on your phone.

It was just a question of how deeply we wanted to rely on digital tools. A website to help people find us and get basic information about the project? Yes. A newsletter (the VERY ONE you’re reading) to provide deeper background on our process and the many wonderful artists who have made it possible? Absolutely. But dedicated slips slips social media accounts? Uh, nope. Creating a fully-formed, “content”-driven digital presence for slips slips, of the kind required by any ambitious enterprise, felt like a step too far. For a trio of volunteer editors, the thankless grind of doubling as social media managers wasn’t something we had stomach for.

That said, we DO all still have personal account on various social platforms - as do our contributors, and their friends, and our friends, and potential contributors, and people who might want to read a copy, etc. So our compromise has been that we can shill for slips slips as individuals, but not in its own name. slips slips is simply slips slips, and we’d like to keep it that way. But as ambivalent individuals in the online world, we’ll do what we can to give it a boost.

All of which is a fairly long-winded way to introduce the social media images I’ve been posting as an ongoing call for contributions. What says “dialogue” better than a word balloon? It’s been fun to come up with these conceptual doodles and share them over the past few weeks across our various networks. If you’re reading this and want to support the project, you’re more than welcome to copy your favorite, paste it into a post, and share it with your own community. We’re easy!