Shooter’s editor sums up Issue 19 in a single line: Coming of Age “explores sex, loss, and startling changes”. Few themes ask more of a reader, and few ask more of the paper they are printed on. This page is built round Shooter’s own words, the ones its editor wrote and the ones printed on its covers, spine and title page, with our notes from the press in between.
In the editor’s words
Shooter is a biannual literary magazine that has published themed issues of short fiction, non-fiction and poetry since 2015. It pays its writers and artists and commissions original cover art for each issue, two habits that tell you how it values the people on its pages. Issue 19, dated Autumn/Winter 2024, is edited and published by Melanie Sykes-White and gathers nineteen contributors, with pieces such as Kait Quinn’s “The Summer We Pooled in the Heat of Your Silver Honda” and Elizabeth Wilson Davies’s “Easy Rider” sitting among short poems that rest lightly on the page.
Melanie’s own voice opens the issue. Her editor’s note sits on a white panel laid over a full bleed reproduction of the cover painting, so the artwork follows you through the door and frames the first words you meet. Any editor can borrow that: carry the cover inside, behind your note or a section opener, and the whole issue hangs together as one designed object.
On the back cover: a list of ways to grow up
Turn the magazine over and Shooter speaks in single words. Below the issue title runs a column of its threads, with Awakening, Bereavement and First Love near the top and Recklessness and Schooldays near the foot. Those twelve words act as a contents page for anyone browsing a shop shelf, and they make a themed issue easy to judge at a glance.
The front follows a system Shooter has used across many issues. The masthead, “Shooter…” with its three trailing dots, sits above a white circle naming the issue, the season and the theme, with Coming of Age picked out in red. Underneath, the commissioned art changes each time. This painting, by Mary Tina Shamli Pillay, lays bands of pale sky, deep blue water, sunlit yellow and a scorched orange shore in a woven, almost pixelated texture. It is a horizon, which suits an issue about thresholds.
For the cover, Shooter uses 300gsm silk under a matt laminate. The film takes the sheen off the painting so it reads as canvas rather than photograph, and it guards the cover against bags, bedside tables and second readings.
On the spine: fiction, non-fiction, poetry
Those three words run down a 6mm spine, with the issue title alongside in clear type. Perfect binding gives Shooter that edge, and with it a place on the shelf beside the issues before it. The format has held steady at 222 x 157mm portrait, a little larger than A5 all round, so a line of poetry seldom has to break awkwardly and a collected run lines up neatly.
Inside, 88 pages of 120gsm uncoated paper carry the writing in full colour. Uncoated is the natural ground for long reading: no glare under a lamp, a warm and slightly toothy surface, and enough body for each leaf to turn with a soft give. The same thinking applies if you are self publishing a poetry collection. A classic serif runs throughout, closer in spirit to old poetry books than to a modern sans. Story and poem titles are set in blue violet between hairline rules, and a pull quote is blown up large in the same colour, an echo of the sea on the cover. For your own journal, take one accent from the cover and keep it for titles and pull quotes; it adds personality without breaking the reading rhythm. Our notes on picking paper for a magazine compare the stocks.
In the emails: the familiar spec
Melanie has trusted us with Shooter for many issues, and our earlier write up of a previous Shooter issue shows how long the format has held. For Issue 19 she sent over the specification she has used before and asked for a proof before printing. We confirmed the details, her print ready PDF followed once the final pieces were in place, and the proof went back to her before anything reached the press.
It is a job where experience shows in what goes unsaid. We know how the cover wraps a 6mm spine and how the uncoated stock takes those blue titles, so Melanie could keep her attention on the writing.
On the title page: printed in Colchester
Shooter has announced that its twentieth issue will close its run as a biannual print magazine before the title evolves, which makes Coming of Age one of the last chapters in a long print story. If you edit a journal and want each new issue to sit beside the last, our literary and indie magazine printing keeps your spec on file so the next one matches. And in the small print at the foot of this issue’s title page, Shooter puts our part plainly: “Printed in Colchester, UK, by Ex Why Zed.”
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
Product cataloguesA5, 28 pages, stapled£166for 100