Chris Anderson knows that it takes a lot of effort to create a porn magazine.
"I would say that overall it takes a lot of effort to create any magazine," he said. "I don't know if a porn magazine is more so, but it takes a lot ... It's challenging."
Anderson is a photographer, manager and co-founder of the hot-off-the-presses Boink, a student-run sex magazine at BU that has gained renown across the globe.
"It's been about five months of constant work," Anderson continued. "It's been fun, but it's also been a lot of work. It's not the type of thing you undertake lightly ... there's a lot of challenges but it's part of the process."
Boink has been the topic of conversation on the Boston University campus for months. "The college guide to carnal knowledge" has left the university administration blushing and denying any association with the publication.
Students are marveling over the hidden corners of Morse Auditorium as the media frenzy continues from Boston's Back Bay to Germany.
But behind the 96 pages of full frontals, sex columns, toy reviews and sexual banter is a team of 25 writers and four photographers who worked round the clock, sometimes more than 40 hours a week, leading up to Boink's launch party on Feb. 17, which Anderson said cost $15,000 an hour.
Now, a week after Boink's release, Anderson said he is pleased at the way the magazine has been selling.
"We had no idea [how Boink would sell] to be perfectly honest," he said. "We of course had high hopes. We're definitely happy with the way that it is."
The Naked Truth
Anderson's co-founder Alecia Oleyourryk, a College of Arts and Sciences senior, first schemed the idea of a BU pornography magazine before the fall semester of 2004.
"Alecia and I first started talking about this over the summer after she got back from her semester in Australia," said Anderson, who is a 38-year-old professional photographer. "We really started talking in mid-September.
"We sent a press release to The [Daily] Free Press in October," Anderson continued, explaining how he and Oleyourryk first released the concept to the public. "We didn't actually want to tell the world at that point, but it happened that way anyway. We just didn't have anything at that point and we were just looking to find writers and photographers."
Anderson said the release of H Bomb, the Harvard University sex magazine, had already set the bar for their publication.
"A lot of expectations were set after the Harvard magazine and we wanted to avoid that ... but you can't control the media we found out."
As a method of promoting the publication, both Oleyourryk and Anderson have been playing up the differences between Boink and H Bomb, which was launched last spring.
"H Bomb was very censored," Oleyourryk said in an interview with The Daily Free Press before Boink's launch. "It only scratched the surface and was really tame [compared] to what we're going to do."
Oleyourryk and Anderson gave their audience more blatant nudity than H Bomb, as well as displaying models' faces, which Harvard's magazine does not always show.
"Ours is porn," Oleyourryk said. "But there's nothing wrong with that. Porn is not bad. It's educational. And a lot more racy."
Although Harvard is the only other school in Boston with a sex magazine, Oberlin College, Swarthmore College and Vassar College have also created sex publications.
Not only is Boink a different kind of magazine than H Bomb, but it is seen differently by school administration. While Boink is shunned by BU, Harvard administration approves of H Bomb and allowed the student government to give magazine managers a $2,000 grant. The magazine is also allowed it to be distributed freely to Harvard students.
Boink, however, is a business endeavor, and charges readers $7.95 per issue, or $4 on subscription, which can be ordered on the Boink website.
"[The money used to fund the magazine] was all through advertising and sponsorship," Anderson said. "Approximate cost is $35,000. That's what it costs to print 20,000 copies and all the other production costs we have."
Anderson explained that the advertisers and sponsors are from area businesses that target colleges as well as some national businesses.
"We haven't tabulated [the magazine's revenue] all out," he said. "[Boink] probably sold close to $10,000 of subscription ... We're just about break-even, which is better than most first time publications do, so we're thankful for that."
Anderson ran a software consulting company for nine years and sold it three years ago. Since then, he has been photographing nude models in his South End studio. The photos he takes for Boink are all done in his studio and models' off campus homes.
In its early publication, Anderson shot photos for H Bomb and brought the idea of a sex magazine to Oleyourryk, who posed nude for him a few years earlier. From there, the idea for a BU porn was born.
Porn in the U.S.A
Anderson said that starting the magazine was difficult at first because he could not find a printer to publish the allusive material.
"We tried a bunch of printers in the U.S. and were turned down by at least eight of them," he said.
Finally he was able to find a willing printer outside of Quebec.
"It [costs] close to $2 an issue," Anderson said. "There's a 50 percent discount for retailers."
After hearing media hype from sources such as the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, Playboy, Vanity Fair-Italy, The Washington Post and Max Magazine-Germany, Newbury Comics approached the creators and asked for distribution rights.
"They contacted us," Anderson said. "In fact, we're starting to get a lot people who want to distribute ... Newbury has 25 locations and we probably have three or four independent [businesses] selling."
Anderson said that after the first few days, Newbury Comics had already sold 200 copies of the magazine and ordered 13 more cases. He said he was excited that Newbury Comics contacted Boink's managers to distribute since BU refuses to sell the magazine on campus.
"We've basically been shut out by BU's Campus Convenience and bookstore," he said.
Anderson has been talking with the Ingram Book Group, the world's largest wholesale distributor of book products, and will possibly be making a deal with the group for the next issue.
The Spice of life
Up to Boink's launch, both Oleyourryk and Anderson said that, although they are the founders of the magazine, there are no real management positions among the staff, which is not a typical business move.
"Everyone is just a contributor," Oleyourryk said. "Even me."
Up next for Anderson and Oleyourryk is the second issue of Boink, which will be focused on the theme of self-gratification, scheduled to be released on May 4.
"For the most part we're not stuck on titles," Anderson said. "Everyone basically helps out where they can
"We don't pay writers or photographers, and the models get paid $100. Nobody really does it for the money, though."
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