Our original guidelines

Look and feel of the magazine.

• High production values, good heavy paper, well laid out, pleasing to look at.
• This would NOT be web based it would be print! Print publications mean you can read them anyplace. If something is on the web you can only read it on a computer. Also monitors don’t have the quality we wanted for the artwork. If someone came out with an inexpensive small easy to use electronic book we might change but the tech is still far on the horizon.
• No boxed "snippets" to entice a person to read the story, they are a waste of perfectly good paper. If we need filler we will fill it with more smut.
• Stories and art are not just filler for the endless pages of advertisements. There would never be more then 20% advertising. If we approached that amount we would simply add more pages of stories and art to lower the story to ad ratio.
• Read one handed. The idea was to come up with a publication that people would read to get aroused, Well ok more then just aroused, the logical conclusion requires one hand to be otherwise occupied while the other holds the magazine.
• Black & White artwork because while there is artistic color art work most of the mood is lost in the color information. A good portion of the best art is black & white.
• Not local to a geographic area. We wanted a publication that was stories, not club or origination events for the area we lived in. Most publications use this stuff as filler because they don’t actually have any content to put in its place and they haven’t sold that ad space. It is easy and cheap to generate this type of filler.
• No contact ads. There are enough ways for people to meet these days. We want our pages to be filled with naughty things to read and look at, not Contact Ads to skip over.
• Actually we would take contact advertising but it would be the same rate as regular advertising.
• We would pay for publishing by building up a good subscription base as opposed to massive advertising. Retail base would follow.
• Print runs will be limited to a number and a method that prints as many copies as needed for actual recipients, plus 1% or 2%. We don’t want a bunch of paper to be wasted.
• If / when retail sales were made they would be done in such a way that unsold magazines didn’t end up in a landfill.

Artwork

• Art is accent for stories. Sure we would have the occasional piece of art that a writer would be inspired by but we wouldn’t just throw any old artwork in to fill space. It should look related to the story.
• Art from real artists. There are tons of people creating erotic art out there by working with what they have already done we can get a more varied sample of artwork. Nearly all adult publications use art from a few (In some cases a very few) photographers By not using this standard method of throwing together a photo spread so the deadline can be met, we can expose our readers to an array of tastes and mediums. We would not limit our artwork to just photography. If someone could create in a medium we were determined to represent it in Consent.
• Artists would not necessarily be "professional" If someone takes the time to create something and it is good then it goes in.
• All artists will be given full credits for their work. If they have a method to contact them for sales or questions from readers then it will be included in the magazine and the website. We want our artists to get the recognition they deserve.
• All copyrights for art will remain with the artist. We want printing rights to publish the magazine but the copyright will stay with the person who actually did the work.
• When more then one photo of a person is used for a story it will be different or part of a logical sequence. Almost all, adult publications have a 3 to 6 page spreads with essentially different cropping of the same 3 or 4 photos. It is boring and not creative. It just fills space.
• No OBGYN shots (and the male equivalent). We all know what boy parts and girl parts look like. Sure we may show a close up of someone’s wobbly bits occasionally but because there is something interesting to see (piercing, tattoo, etc) not just to fill a bit more space.
• Use more mediums then just photography. Almost all magazines stick to photography because it is easy and quick to produce. There are lots of other ways to express erotic art (painting, drawing, sculptures etc). If an artist can get their work in a format we can print then we will consider using it.
• Artwork will not be too "arty". Paint splotches on a canvas, or some potato shaped blob of bronze is not erotic. If there is someone tied to the canvas it might be erotic but also may not.
• Naked is not erotic art. It is just naked. Erotic is a mood or attitude of the person in the artwork or and idea conveyed by the artist.

Writing

• Stories would be well written and checked for spelling and grammar.
• Stories would also be set to a standard of naughtiness. We will actually reject work that does nothing for us. The point of the magazine is whacking material, no matter how well apiece may be technically, if we didn’t feel the urge, what’s the point.
• Never use the ‘formula’ style of stories that seem to fill the pages of normal adult magazines. The ones that all sound the same only the kinks and the genders have been changed to make them look different. Penthouse letters/forum and the Hustler equilvalant being the worst examples.
• Tasia and I would not write all of the stories for the magazine. Our goal was to get wide enough base of writers so we could only write occasionally. We wanted to hear from lots of different ideas not just ours.
• Diversity in our stories. We didn’t want to get into the rut most magazines have where stories are interchangeable. We wanted stories that were blatant, subtle, excruciatingly hot, hot but made the you get off but also think, stories that left you with a pleasantly aroused but not needing to be dealt with right now feeling, and humorous. Sure humor is not erotic (unless you are into tickling) a scene gone badly can be as fulfilling as and truly raunchy one.
• No story could be too high brow. If you can’t figure out if something is erotic because there is too much symbolism, then it isn’t.
• Raunchy and intelligent are not mutually exclusive.
  Over use of profanity would be edited out. Sure dirty words are a part of erotic ideas but most writers seem to think that it is possible to replace good ideas and original thought with profanity. If the situation requires the language then use it, otherwise write for the those who can appreciate a good story and not the unwashed masses who feel that Die Hard was well written (Fuck. The word to use when you haven’t got anything more intelligent to say).
• No "Recipe" or "What I Did Last Night" stories. Good work explores the characters personality, why are they enjoying what they are doing or why not. Who are they.
• Because we are more concerned with stories that have a good naughty basis we would work with writers on their technical aspects with the end result being a good quality story that is very naughty. An idea is more important then the product presented to us.
• While we would edit the stories and articles, any editing would not change the original author’s voice.
• Authors would have to make changes so they would keep their voice. If Tasia or I helped too much it might not be the author’s voice any longer.
• Stories would always be positive. Positive doesn’t have to mean no kidnapping, or force but it does mean that people in the situation will not be abused, degraded or humiliated or demeaned unless of course the characters enjoy that sort of thing.
• Copyright would always remain with the writer. Even if work with writers who may not have the technical part of their writing down we want them to have control of their work. We just want publishing/printing rights for the magazine. If their work is good enough to use in a later way such as a book then we would get the rights to use it again.

Tasia and I started looking for stories for the first issue. Each of us had written a bit and we knew people who had written a bit so we started to pester our friends for stories and art for our new publication. That first day we had arrived at the name Consent because that was the basis for BDSM play and it was what we felt was missing from most of the other publications we looked at. In less then 24 hours not only was Consent born it was creeping forward.

It took a little deciding to arrive at our quarterly publication schedule. We concluded that there was no way we could do this once a month and back then we weren’t even sure we could get enough content to print every other month so we arrived at our quarterly schedule. This also worked because people who were waiting to read their copy would know when it would arrive. We planned our publication to arrive on the solstices and equinoxes. Since it was already August, and we weren’t sure what we were getting into, and the Autumn Equinox was rapidly approaching, there was no way we could be ready to publish for the Autumn Equinox, so our first issue would come out on the winter solstice. This gave us nearly 5 months to get things in place and work out the bugs. Because both of us come from a math/science background we listed our first issue as #0. It was labeled "Our training issue." We were looking on Issue #0 as something like a training bra. We also called it Issue #0 because we would then have every year follow multiples of 1, 2, 3 & 4, not to mention that making our First issue #0 would annoy the non science types. This can never be a bad thing.