Gordon Woolf's Blog

Still room for print in magazines

There's still room for new print magazines. Design students in Amsterdam have just published a new print magazine, Odd. The beginning of 2010 saw 56 new magazines on US newsstands and if you think that's just a chance number, the figure for June, the latest given on the Mr Magazine website is 77.

In 1986, Samir Husni published his first Guide to New Magazines listing the 234 new magazines that I was able to find and document in 1985. The 25th Anniversary edition of the Guide will be out soon listing 704 new magazines that were first launched in 2009.

If you subscribe to the Magazine Launch feed from http://www.magazinelaunch.com run by the Magazine Publishers of America (MPA) you'll get their regular notifications -- and they are only the publications that make use of their service.

Among the most recent titles scrawere: Honor Student, Wine Press, Vintage Magazine, ChopChop (a food mag for 5 to 12 year olds!), Livestrong Quarterly (for cancer survivors and supporters), Parents of Color, and a number of regional magazines. The latter seem part of a strong trend in publishing.

All of these are in print, though all seem to have strong websites and, often, web editions. One innovation which cannot be duplicated online is the scratch-and-smell cover. 

So, while much effort goes in to finding a profitable means of having an online publication, it seems the most popular and successful way is still with a "dead tree" publication backed up by online extras and promotion.

One problem for publications which would like to be online is that a high quality file is still massive if you are to compete with printed graphics. Even publications which cater for the graphics industry find it necessary to resort to slimmed down versions for those without really fast broadband connections.

And I wonder how many other people have the same problem that I do? I subscribe to a top quality online magazine, and download it the instant I get the email advising that it is available. But often I do not even get to glancing through the PDF. It sits there on my desktop until a week or sometimes two later I will print out a sad looking grayscale version on my laser printer. 

A print magazine goes to our lougeroom where it will be read during rest periods or while watching TV. Sure, I can take a wirelessly connected laptop there too, but I seldom do. Reading on screen is not a relaxing exercise, reading a print magazine is.

Do how much of it yourself?

As a small scale publisher, what should you do for yourself and what should you pay someone else to do?

That is a common question, and someone on a publishing email list rightly commented that it always seemed that the "experts" were saying that the newbie should get everything done (at a fee) by someone in the industry.

There is nothing wrong with anyone learning to do everything for themselves -- I even did a course in paper making because I thought it might help me understand the most basic of the raw materials we deal with, and it did.

The problem is that too many people are misled by the promises of people that everything is easy.

If someone...

• studies the book market,
• spends time not only reading the books on the subject (and most can be found in public libraries so you need only to eventually buy the ones which are going to be essential to you),
• talks to everyone in the industry (I've learned a lot from a bloke whose house I walk past into town who is a forklift driver for a major printer who seems similarly interested in learning more about the products he hauls around),
• is prepared to do the job (for example the layout) and then to look at it critically and do it again (I nearly sent a printing business broke when I looked at a book we'd produced as I handed the first copies to the customer, and then said "it's not good enough, is it" and we did it again, but we grew into a much stronger company),

then that someone can match everything the experts can do. It's not brain surgery -- you can practice without doing too much harm to anyone but yourself.

BUT, someone who says, I've never done a book before but I have Word (or I've just bought InDesign) and then, with a printed copy in hand, looks at finding a distributor or for someone who will tell how to get publicity for it.

I'm all for people doing things for themselves. I tend to run a mile from anyone who adopts the description of "consultant", and I like the description of expert as "ex", a has-been, and "spurt", a drip under pressure.