jeudi 14 octobre 2004

Publishing... Was it Worth it? The demise of DU... A number of my weblog readers have asked, "What happened to the magazine, Ed?" For those who don't know I used to write, edit and publish a photography magazine specialising in darkroom processing and printing. Camera work was covered to a certain extent after an ill-judged, in hindsight, re-launch which saw the title change from "Darkroom User" to "Camera & Darkroom." I'd known that American C&D magazine had abruptly ceased publication in September 1995 and that I wanted to use a similar name on the masthead of my own journal. But, I was careful not to jump on the name and adopt it immediately because of being seen as assuming the credibility and goodwill of that popular title... and it had been owned by Larry Flynt, the multimillionaire publisher of "Hustler" the man's magazine and I didn't want to receive any serious letters from his lawyers. Such is the specialist publishing world that the US title "Camera & Darkroom", successful and highly regarded though it was, had been sold off to the non-rival publication "Outdoor Photography" simply for the former's 35,000 contributor mailing list to be added to the 300,000 plus mailing list of the latter! To kill-off a great specialist magazine just for the potential of a 10% increase in sales of an established but non-specialist magazine seemed like a sure-fire way to me to alienate the readership of the fallen title who were promised the new magazine as fulfilment of their subscriptions. And so it was! Similarly, when I changed DU to C&D it was seen by a few, maybe many, as the wrong move. For some time before I was unsure too, but then I thought if "I've never tried because I don't..." like something then I'll never know the outcome... so I did it! I didn't dilute the darkroom equipment, techniques and processing content at all. On the contrary I increased the page count with, in effect, extra value on camera technique and equipment reviews with coverage of a variety of niche models such as the Gandolfi Variant, Alpa SW12, Lotus Rapid View, Cadet... to (just mainstream) models such as the Mamiya M7 and Hasselblad SWC. Certainly my writers, and readers I thought, were specialists and wanted different techniques, reviews and advice from the run-of-the-mill photo publications usually spotted quickly on the news-stand by the inevitable eye-contact with a bikini-clad (or less clad) female on the cover. But the big publishers know that the higher the "nipple count" (their technical term for nudity) the higher their sales. I tried to provide a sensible alternative and didn't stand much of a chance. Flat advertising sales, especially when digital interest started to gather pace, and increasingly negative collection of advertising revenues meant that I became typical of that well-known anecdote in the small-publishing world which goes something like... Question - How do you make $25,000 a year out of publishing? Answer - By putting $50,000 a year of your own money into it! It sounds funny... but it isn't a joke. I ended up with advertising revenues owed running into five figures with no prospect of seeing the money... and I had already paid the Advertising Sales sharks their 25% cut, plus I had paid the State their Value Added Tax of 17.5%... and still not collected the invoiced money those added percentages were based on! The debtors ranged from well-known specialist manufacturers in the US to dozens of dealers and wholesalers in the UK... all of them, I might add, still operating quite successfully! Of course some of the dealers owed much more to many other companies (and the State) but were quite smart and went into voluntary receivership with debts totalling anything up to a quarter of a million collectively to companies such as Kodak, Durst, Nikon, Canon, Public Utility Companies, Print Processing Photo labs, etc... and after a receiver had been appointed to sort out the mess he would eventually decide, because no one else was interested, that there was no alternative but to allow perhaps a close relative of the previous MD to buy the assets for a nominal sum and continue trading in the same shop with the same stock to the same customers but with a name or two on the headed note paper changed. And some of these traders have carried off this neat legal trick more than once with few eyebrows raised! The ripped-off suppliers keep on supplying them because they now have to have their digital products in front of the eager buying public... and for one to pull out of even one location would leave plenty of opportunity for boxes to be shifted by their rivals. So I got out of publishing, and editing, and writing... and even out of photography for a year or so. The whole process seemed too tainted to want to continue to be a part of it. I realised a few weeks ago that I'd hardly loaded or unloaded a camera during the previous year... and that I had at least a hundred films to contact from the year or so before that. Hence my wishing, after a return to a tiring darkroom session or three, that maybe digital was the easier option... time was simply too short for conventional, traditional, or wet-process photography - whatever you want to call it. I reached such a nadir - close coupled with the summer sun telling me it was making sporadically shorter appearances for a next few months, so see you next year hopefully - that I decided to pour my thoughts out no matter who, or if, anybody would read them. This self-imposed exercise has been an awakening for me... I have more energy throughout the day... look for ideas... shoot more film... print more images... write my blog pieces after dinner knowing I have just two hours to finish, edit, scan an image and upload to the Salon.com server at around my daily designated 9pm Paris time deadline. It's a challenge... it's fun and it keeps me in contact with family and friends old and new. In some ways it's a replacement of the challenge and fun I had as an editor and publisher of a photo magazine... except that this time it's more or less for free and certainly far less hassle! So... If you've never tried because you don't... do! 9:34:15 PM    comment []