The objective of the intro to magazine publishing class I’m taking is—unsurprisingly—to launch one’s own magazine. The online lectures are targeted toward creating a for-profit magazine, one supported not only by single-copy sales, subscriptions, and advertising, but also by product tie-ins and “advertorials,” in short, a magazine like most of the dwindling pool you see, and sometimes buy, at your newsstand. The introductory course lecture insists that while these are dark times for the magazine industry all is not gloom. Out of crisis comes opportunity—for that sighted entrepreneur with a brilliant and ruthless new business model.
So naturally I chose to start a Socialist magazine on the model of the Masses, or the Anvil, or the old Partisan Review. Worse, since I didn’t think such a venture could sustain itself in this day and age through sales and subs, I decided that Exposition magazine (I went meta) would be a not-for-profit, dependant upon institutional subventions and grants. One may be forgiven for concluding that I have learned absolutely nothing from personal experience (particularly given my guilty admiration for slick magazines that turn a profit). However, I worried the course would not be worth the tuition if I didn’t apply what I learned to something I might actually consider doing.
The instructor—whom we will call Steve (not his real name)—says that, thanks to the savage realities of the Great Recession, the editorial and business sides of magazines are closer than they ever have been, and I believe this is true. At TriQuarterly we didn’t necessarily think ourselves immune to economic reality, but rather believed that nurturing a literary culture that may not otherwise survive in a market subjugated to the bottom line was precisely the mission of a university-based literary magazine.
Cast to the barbarities of the market, one might conclude that magazines in this era cannot support themselves primarily on advertisement. Not necessarily true says Steve. Maxim once boasted a sell-through rate of 70%, thus inspiring a new maxim: it is not possible to support a magazine through advertising without feeling that one needs to take a shower at the end of the day.
When Margaret Anderson, the legendary editor of the Little Review, found—having embraced anarchism and published the likes of Emma Goldman and John Reed—that no one would advertize in her magazine, she began publishing brief inserts on pages where advertising would normally appear. Of this nature:
Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company ought to advertise something, though I don’t know just what. The man I interviewed made such a face when I told him we were radical that I haven’t had the courage to go back and pester him for the desired full-page. The Carson-Pirie attitude toward change of any sort is well-known—I think resent even having to keep pace with the change in fashions.
It may be worth a try. Steve also says publishers need to be open to profitable new models or perhaps not-for-profitable new models.
Apologies for the gap between postings. I’ve been scrambling to meet several deadlines, the most intriguing of which is the course work for a course on starting online on magazine publishing.
A necessary and yet humiliating aspect of losing one’s job on the pretext of technological change is the sense that one needs to be retrained, reeducated to keep up with the changing job market. Of course, this notion is generally a byproduct of anxiety rather than reason because in the job market—insofar as such a thing can be identified—there is very little that can be accomplished in technical or vocational training for the vast majority of fields that couldn’t better be learned through the experience of an actual job. The fact is that in terms of sheer economic efficiency, shrimp fishermen are most productive when they are fishing for shrimp rather than sopping up oil and manufacturers are more productive when they are manufacturing rather than working as a hostess at Appleby’s. And, in my specific case, online editing is far less demanding and complex than print editing, so the idea that anyone with experience in the latter would be unable to do the former is absurd.
Just the same, having worked for only one magazine over the last thirteen years I have wondered, over the past few months, how universal and transferable my skills are. So, the email advertisement for this course that came through on a job site I subscribe to caught my eye. The instructor has a solid reputation in marketing and advertising for several glossy magazines in New York. I was reluctant, though, to pay the money for the tuition. The next day, however, I got an email telling me that I’d sold a short story for the exact same amount as the course cost, so I decided it was kismet of some sort and enrolled.
The course is designed with a conventional advertising/subscription for profit model, so not exactly my area of expertise, but, as I said, the idea was to see how magazine work is done for profit. Over the next few days, I will provide an account of what I have learned.
In a post titled “Print Culture and the Fate of the Literary Quarterly” Salon blogger Front Porch Republic (FPR) references TriQuarterly and Shenandoah going online and worries what these changes mean for print literature. FPR sites similar concerns from George Core, the editor of Sewanee Review, a journal to which he subscribes, and also quotes R.T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah, who, in part, blames Shenandoah’s predicament on “the disproportion between the number of people who would love to publish in Shenandoah and the number of who would love to read it.”
FPR goes on to say that he buys or subscribes to a select number of literary magazines “out of duty, I suppose, and out of loyalty too, and perhaps out of guilt, but also out of the belief that my money is better spent on, and is more needed in the service of, a Republic of Letters in print.” While I don’t know a magazine editor who would want anyone to subscribe out of a sense of duty or guilt, it is true that the profusion of graduate writing programs over the last 20 years has led to a profusion of writers and a profusion of new magazines but not a profusion of subscribers. And I would go so far to suggest that if you have an advanced degree in creative writing and can’t find any magazines that you would not only willingly subscribe to but also eagerly anticipate each number of, then you are likely in the wrong line of work.
Take, for example, FPR commenter JustJuli, who seems to view her time spent in a graduate writing program as like living in a North Korean gulag. Now, set loose with an MFA from her (apparently compulsory) course of study, and consequently unemployable, JustJuli says she must choose between subscribing to literary magazines and shoeing her children. Fortunately, having been deprogrammed from her harrowing brush with creativity, she finds the choice a no-brainer.
Commenter tomreedtoon too says piffle to FPRs concern for the future of print culture because, he states boldly (literally), “nobody reads any more (sic).” And he has proof that this is true—for tomreedtoon has said the exact same thing in comments to previous posts that were about people reading things and yet people still keep putting up posts about people reading things! How does tomreedtoon carry on in the face of such willful intransigence? One is inclined to wonder. Of course, the notion that no one reads anymore is common these days, largely, one imagines, among people who don’t read.
H/T Marya
Buried in UC-Berkeley professor Pamela Samuelson’s thorough evaluation of the implications of the Google Book Search Settlement is this inadvertent Onion headline: “Google’s senior management has actively been trying to expand the firm’s revenue models.” Should the settlement be approved, Google will still be allowed to “track reader’s past and present online actions and locations through some unstated combination of cookies, IP addresses, referrer logs, and numerous distinguishing characteristics of a reader’s hardware and software.” These practices, according to Samuelson, “would allow Google to know ‘what books are searched for, which are browsed (even if not purchased), what pages are viewed . . . and how much time is spent on each page.'”
Michael Chabon, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jonathan Lethem oppose the settlement, fearing fewer people might browse, say, Tropic of Cancer if they knew that somewhere in a bunker somewhere somebody is keeping track of how long they are lingering over the naughtiest bits. Of course, lest one become too paranoid, we can be reassured that all this monitoring will not be conducted in the name of decently or patriotism but commerce.
According to Wired, via Reuters, a consensus arose at this year’s BookExpo America (the yearly orgy of commercialism for the book publishing industry) among publishers that an e-book alternative must arise to sidestep the Apple/Amazon battle for hegemony. Which suggests, remarkably, that unlike in previous platforms wars, such as Betamax v. VHS or HD-DVD v. Bluray, the winner won’t be one or the other but rather none of the above. As it stands you have Amazon, and their attempted i-Tunes-ification of the publishing industry versus latecomer Steve Nobody-Reads-Books-Anymore-but-We’re-More-Than–Happy-to-Sell-Them-to-You-Anyway-in-a-Format-Unreadable-by-Devices-Other-Than-Ours Jobs.
All of this digital maneuvering has drawn attention to what might be called an analog advantage to printed books. As Susan Peterson Kennedy, president of Penguin, points out, “The devices have not caught up with the content. Contrary to popular opinion, the book is actually so far more flexible.”
