05 — Publishing — 2023
Pressroom
for The Alcove Review
A quarterly literary review with four staff and 1,200 submissions a season. Their workflow lived in a shared drive and a whiteboard. Pressroom is the smallest system we could build that replaced both without erasing how they actually work.
- 1,240
- 6.2 days
- 0
01
Fitting an existing practice
The Alcove’s editors had a working process refined over nineteen years. The failure mode of publishing software is to replace that with the vendor’s process. We wrote the whiteboard down instead — three reads, two vetoes, one editor of record — and made the software enforce exactly that and nothing more.
Manuscripts render in the magazine’s actual typesetting, in the editing view. Editors caught line-break problems six weeks earlier than they used to.
02
Built to be inherited
The whole archive is a single SQLite file the managing editor can copy to a thumb drive. We consider that a feature and wrote it into the contract.
“Every tool we replaced, we could explain in one sentence. That was the test.”
Quartermast
Inventory reconciliation for a grocery co-op with 900 member-owners.