Memoirs of a Dying Swan
This is a slightly edited version of our editorial from our fifth and final issue of The Alarmist, released Spring 2015.
We started off The Alarmist’s first editorial by avoiding self-congratulation. The writing should do the talking, we said. And it might have done if there were enough people around to listen.
I suppose a few good people did, and that would be okay if we could afford to spend a few grand every six months as part of our very own half-yearly vanity project. But with one editor working freelance and another working full time in the public sector, we had to find a way of making the magazine a sustainable model, without selling out our ideals.
That, of course, was easier said than done.
In order to cut the huge costs of printing we made some compromises for issue two. We couldn’t afford to have ridiculous but fun inserts like balloons which inflate to reveal (in our opinion) a gloriously tacky pun-based poem, or scratchcards which you had to scratch to reveal the end of a piece of writing. That was a shame but we still kept to the extremely high quality production of the magazine, gaining worldwide distribution from that issue onward.
As a result of our distribution deal, we needed to print more copies to get it to the stores who wanted to stock it, which meant cheaper unit costs per magazine. This all sounds great, but reality is much more of a shitter than you might have so far realised.
We desperately wanted the magazine to garner the readership we felt it deserved, so we also brought our price down from £9.50 to £6.00. The idea was that this would give people more of an incentive (or at least remove a disincentive) to purchase it/read it, despite cutting potential profit margins by doing so.
It is easy to ask questions such as, “If you wanted more readers, why not make it available online?” or “Why not feature advertisements to help subsidise the production costs?”. There are much longer answers to these questions that we could give (involving concepts of value, appreciation, tangibility and design specifications, among other things), but the simplest one is that we didn’t want to.
Although we won’t cover it any great detail, we will try to address the advertisement question here. Perhaps, you could argue, we should be pragmatic and consider running advertising, especially if it’s for products that we’re au fait with (such as a guide book on silly phrases from other countries entering our language)? Well, we’re not really au fait with advertising anything. If something is worthy as a product, then this should be the role of natural order or proper journalism to point out, and certainly not because those journalists (or the place their work is featured) is being paid by the company manufacturing the product in the first place. The latter is a strong feature of the sorry state of journalism today.
We’ve also shunned advertising and communicated ourselves in a fairly idiosyncratic way. This would make it a lot harder for us to take ourselves seriously, and be taken seriously, if we suddenly started advertising some sort of substitute spread for butter, for example.
Most importantly, in literary magazines, there is realistically very little desire to advertise and very little money to be made. Generally speaking, advertisers are not interested in magazines of poetry and fiction because, sadly, most people aren’t interested in magazines of poetry and fiction. Furthermore, the sort of people who are interested in poetry and fiction tend to be the sort of folk who actively try to avoid the bullshit consumerism of the masses and they’d be far less likely to stand for it.
To be fair, in trying to get ourselves better known, we did sell out a bit. The increased status attributed to magazines based on their Twitter followers or Facebook likes is depressingly real. People see it as validation of the magazine itself. Fewer likes on Facebook or followers on Twitter somehow signal a venture that is less legitimate.
We ended up paying about £50 altogether to Facebook for about a month in order to get more coverage and likes for our page. It feels shitty admitting that we cheapened ourselves to paying them money to alter an algorithm in our favour, but we would argue that we were already victims to the terrible odds stacked against running a literary magazine.
Sadly, running an independent magazine is fraught with the challenge of being up against it from the start. We believe it was Ludwig Wittgenstein who said, “Money, money, money must be funny in a rich man’s world.” How true he was.
The truth is that by taking on distribution as we mentioned earlier, the outcome of which is access to a huge number of shops (hundreds) across the world, we would have to operate on a sale or return model which doesn’t actually involve the return aspect. This means that any magazines not sold are essentially pulped, or worse, just thrown in the bin, and not necessarily even recycled.
The sale or return model gives no incentive for the store to give two shits about the magazine it stocks. If it doesn’t sell, there’s very little cost to them involved, other than the place it held on the shelf (if they even bothered to put it out — some places didn’t).
This sale or return distribution model is supposed to work well for everyone, but it fails any magazines that don’t want to take on advertising. The idea is that the shops wouldn’t take the risk on magazines in the first place because magazines are low margin and fairly insignificant earners for most stores. The problem is that this current distribution model fails the independent magazine makers the most because often stores will order copies and not even place them on the shelves. Some stores will order a ridiculous amount of copies that will never sell, and this pushes the distributor purchase-order up unnecessarily. Though the unit costs per issue may drop, additional copies are printed which will never be sold. Traditionally, for the non-independent magazines, this hasn’t been a problem because it helps them to (misleadingly) demonstrate higher distribution to advertisers. But this is a problem for independent magazines because it puts them into serious financial jeopardy.
Further perils await. Distributors mark up any imported copies (non-UK) way beyond the actual costs to export them. This doesn’t help anyone. It simply means that the copy is less likely to be sold, meaning no money made for the shop, losses for the distributers and losses for the magazine makers. In fact, the inflated costs they add to the retail price mean an individual copy of this magazine will cost you more to buy in a shop outside of the UK than it would to purchase online and for us to send to you by airmail (increasing our carbon footprint unnecessarily).
One of the worst things about all of this is how difficult it is to be honest about the abject state of much of the independent magazine industry because it’s an industry fuelled by projections of success. If a magazine appears successful, people believe it is of more worth and will be far more likely to give it a punt.
You probably didn’t realise this, but most magazines lie to you. Not literally the magazines, but the people running them. They pretend the magazine is a great success to try and get into your pockets. When you see that their back issues are sold out, you might think, “Blimey, they’re doing well. I’ll have to check that magazine out.” But those sold are from a much smaller number of copies they kept for themselves (usually only a few hundred at most).
To be perfectly honest, most of the magazine industry is in a fucking mess, but everyone belonging to it works unbelievably hard to try to tell you otherwise because accepting reality means the public will value the magazine less.
As nearly all magazines of any ambition need to use distributors and nearly all of those distributors operate on a sale or return basis, the sad reality is that the latest copy of that magazine is more likely to be pulped than purchased. Many of the magazines you consider to be successful might only sell 25% to 50% of their copies in stores. If you consider that people running those magazines usually only make about 30% to 40% of the retail price for any sold copies, you can quickly start to see the barriers placed up from the offset to those wanting to run a sustainable magazine.
However, it’s important that shops do stock their magazine as part of the ongoing strategy to appear successful and, therefore, legitimate in the eyes of the customers. A terribly sad part to running a magazine is that in order for people to deem the magazine worth purchasing or to even take a punt on it, they need to see it in certain shops (like us having the magazine in Barnes & Noble, Foyles, and Tate Modern), or be aware that it’s sold in certain shops. This helps propagate the myth of its success to a point where it may start becoming a success (if the mag makers are really fucking lucky).
The highest margins people running independent magazines take are from selling the issues directly. But the printing costs (usually thousands of pounds per issue) mean that they can barely afford to print enough extras for them to sell. There is also the problem that they may end up with surplus copies that won’t sell or take a lot longer than they’d hope to, causing space and/or financial implications related to storage or the delays in selling them.
Independent magazine makers suffer the most from all of these barriers. They’re usually young(ish), involved in creative outputs (meaning skint) and usually operate on better ideals than corporations (meaning, “‘Fuck you, advertising!”). They have higher production costs because they can’t afford to print in higher numbers and the magazines are usually printed to a higher aesthetic standard, which translates as less profit per issue sold.
It may sound harsh for us to say this, but the independent magazines that push aspiration over inspiration (of which there are plenty) don’t operate quite in the same bracket and with the same obstacles as literary magazines. Though it will certainly be a struggle, they have much more of a fighting chance for success. Literary magazines, a label which we reluctantly accept and use, are more likely to have to bow out early due to injuries. There is much less chance for them to be sustainable.
The truth is that outside of a very small, niche pool of people, there’s very little interest in literary magazines (or magazines of new writing or whatever else you want to call them). There is more interest in contributing for those magazines than there is for actually reading them and purchasing them. We and many other literary magazines receive over four times as many people submitting work to the magazine as purchasing it. Essentially there are more writers than readers, and that’s a fundamental problem for running a sustainable magazine. That’s why so many printed literary magazines are affiliated to universities (which usually mean heavy subsidisation) or are charity or philanthropically funded.
You may have heard of Port Magazine. They have done tremendously well as an independent magazine, but their editor, Dan Crowe, previously worked on a literary magazine called Zembla.
Their idea was to try to bring new writing and literature to a wider audience. It had advertising and exclusive celebrity endorsements and features. But it lasted only eight issues before the plug was pulled. People, it turns out, just weren’t interested.
It seems to us that for an independent magazine to be successful they must allude to aspirational lifestyle. Look at how, increasingly, we see independent magazines celebrate, for example, artisan bakers and baristas at the expense of celebrating what they create. This is not too far removed from the few successful well-known literary magazines, like Granta, Paris Review and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. They have been criticised for publishing weak work from well-known and established writers over better work they could find in the slush-pile from unknown writers. Essentially, it’s stooping to the market and it’s hard to be particularly angry with the editors when you think of it that way. The system is fucked to favour writers and pieces which are infinitely more marketable. If we’re going to be angry, we need to focus that anger on the system and where we fit within it.
With the risk of appearing as reverse snobs, or even simply snobs, we couldn’t give a fuck about the latest fashion magazine sold at ridiculous costs, containing as many pages in adverts as content (some pages of adverts and content being completely indistinguishable from one another). Does it enrich our souls? Does it fuck, but if we keep telling ourselves it does, then maybe we’ll believe it does.
At The Alarmist, we’re fucking bored of the print is dead/print is not dead bullshit that you see every month. We’re sorry to say that we helped perpetuate that bullshit in a few press releases and articles because that stuff appeals for some reason, and we wanted love in the form of sales. Newspapers and blogs lap that shit up, despite how dire and tiresome it really is, and despite its failure to paint any real picture of the independent magazine industry.
Look at the latest book on independent magazines, imaginatively titled Print Is Dead. Long Live Print. To be fair, the author, Ruth Jamieson, does recognise the difficulty and barriers from the sale or return distribution model, but the overall purpose of the book is to demonstrate that independent magazines are thriving. It’s already set up to prove a positive hypothesis, and therefore appears to succeed. But we could publish a book talking to all the independent magazines in the last ten years that are long buried and do similar with an opposing hypothesis. We’ll put it out here and say it: in five years time at least 40% of the magazines featured in Print Is Dead. Long Live Print will be dead and buried. And, once again, this will be especially the case when you look at literary magazines.
Steve Watson of Stack (an subscription service for eclectic independent magazines) made an interesting point in an interview with The Magic Elephant in November 2014, claiming, “Very often magazines close down not because they run out of money, but because people who are involved in it become tired of running the magazine.”
It’s partly true but it’s also missing out some key information about why the people involved are so tired. Many of the magazines that close down could afford to keep going but they give up, more often than not, because all the passion they put in ends up with too few people reading the magazine for it to be justified. You can’t keep ploughing energy into something with so little fruition. It’s a rational consequence. We can’t keep putting so much effort and energy into The Alarmist only to make small losses and reach only several hundred people. We’d be much more willing to lose money if we were reaching a much bigger audience, and making short stories and poetry interesting to people outside the usual niche, but we’re not.
New magazines can be assisted greatly by influential people. The allure of celebrity endorsements helps a lot. It’s a sad and unfortunate state of affairs that our society is so celebrity-obsessed but that’s the nature of the beast. Having content from well-known and well-respected people can help drive sales (although it wasn’t sufficient for Zembla). Positive coverage from newspapers and independent magazine influencers can be very useful for how the magazine is perceived.
Some of these influencers have not been as helpful to us as we would have hoped, and have shared business interests and ventures, which on a political landscape would smell more than a wee bit whiffy.
Using our hard earned cash, we went to a Guardian Masterclass event called ‘Reinventing Magazines’ in summer of 2012, featuring, amongst others, Steve Watson (as mentioned earlier) and Danny Miller (co-founder of Little White Lies and the Church of London creative agency). It was incredible. Not in a good way. We ended up paying quite a whack for them to advertise their respective agencies and services to us, teaching us close to nothing in the process**.
We were chuffed to have our first issue featured on It’s Nice That, but it’s been incredibly hard to get any well-known or influential websites or mags to carry that momentum forward. We got a great write-up in Dazed and Confused about nine months later, courtesy of Jacob Denno, the editor of Popshot, but aside from that, getting influential people or media outlets to feature your indie mag when it happens to mainly feature short stories and poetry, over pictures of food or people in shit outfits, is close to impossible.
And something that we haven’t got to yet is the public. We’re in an era when the cost of living continues to rise more than our wages. The consequential collateral damage means perceived extravagances like magazines end up on the receiving end. But, hold on, we all have some blood on our hands, including us. Most of us can well afford a couple of pints, a bottle of wine, or a cocktail on a Thursday evening after work. We can afford the shit jacket and shoes we’re wearing as we write this (and you read this). We really don’t need to watch The Fast and the Furious 34; we could all read a good independent magazine instead. There are plenty of wonderful magazines still out there, some of which have been resurrected, like The Baffler, some of which are close to death (but they won’t tell you because they’re still pretending to be successful).
Another huge part of the reason for independent magazines suffering from the start is the current trend, and our unhealthy expectation, for free content. This ongoing thirst for free content may be killing or severely restricting art and journalism, and we’re not going to hypocritically pretend that we don’t play some part in it. But we’re at least willing to recognise that this same thirst for free means that the complaints about how art and, particularly, journalism have been negatively dictated by advertising are not going to be taken seriously unless we make more effort to curtail it, starting by supporting independent magazines and journalism.
It’s this same thirst for free which means less opportunity for journalists and artists to be paid for the work that they do. This will, and already has, translated to less serious journalism and art, and an expectation for journalists or artists to work simply in exchange for exposure, which we’ve, sadly, asked many to do.
This same ridiculous thirst for free means less opportunity to pay artists, and this same inexcusable thirst for free also means that Issue 6 of The Alarmist will never be held in your hands. Okay, the last one might not be as bad as the others, but let’s not forget that these expectations nudge romance closer to the cliff’s edge.
It hasn’t all been doom and gloom. It’s been a wonderful experience and we’ve achieved great things. We knew fuck all about the magazine industry: distribution, paper stock, printing, editing, curating, selling, invoicing (speaking of which, if you’re reading this in Mag Nation in Australia, could you ask them to pay us the invoice from 2013?)*, and now we do.
When we’re feeling in a more positive light, we can take great pride in certain successes, but, right now, we have to accept that we tried and we failed. We tried, we failed. That could well be our epitaph.
Our ambition was to try to attract a wider audience to short stories, poetry and literature than the usual niche. We designed the magazine beautifully with that in mind. We used more humour to try to draw people in. It turns out that our audience, nevertheless, actually comprised of the usual suspects. This is not to say that we’re anything other than immensely grateful to them, but it is to say that we failed in our biggest aim.
As we draw to a close, it’s hard to see how we could have been so naïve to have ever thought we could achieve that aim. Dan Crowe couldn’t achieve it backed with celebrity content and major fashion advertising, how the fuck were we ever going to do it?
We noticed from a recent interview with Dan Burgess of Firewords Quarterly that they are attempting to carry the mantle of our ambition. And we wish them well, but we can’t see them fulfilling it.
In the end, achieving our main objective was way beyond our capabilities. Our eyes were exponentially bigger than our bellies. But we won’t be crying ourselves to sleep every night. We believe Johnny Depp’s character, George Jung, puts it pretty well in Blow when he says, “I force a smile, knowing that my ambition far exceeded my talent.”
The Alarmist, like many other independent magazines, is a dying swan, singing its last song, tears streaming down its face, pleading for help in a wilderness where few people can rescue it.
If anyone has heard our screams, they’ve been pretending that they can’t. And we’ve gotten so used to the idea of dying that it quite appeals to us now anyway.
Good night, precious angels.
Gary & Mansour
*As the issue went to print, Mag Nation finally paid the invoice. Whoops!
**On revisiting this, it reads a bit too negative about people who have done a lot to champion independent magazines, and who are passionate and enthusiastic about them.
