Lew Stringer wrote:big bad bri wrote:
I used to buy a load of scifi mags dvd mags etc & they are all gone yet their is quite a few tv guides floating around when it used to be only tv & Radio times back in the day.Icant help feeling that all print weekly mags /comics will be confined to the history books within the next decade
There's still a healthy number of magazines on the shelves though. Titles come and go, just as they always have, depending on the tastes of the times.
When you say sci fi mags, do you mean the ones featuring prose stories? Most of those ended decades ago although Interzone is still going, and Analog is still imported to newsagents.
Magazine publishing is pretty cut throat. Simply getting a magazine onto the stand (ie for Smiths to consider having it in their shops for you to sell copies) costs a minimum of £3000. Then there's printing on top of that, the major cost of any publication (the actual editorial costs are proportionately smaller). If you get it right and your sales exceed your overheads then good for you, but when there are hundreds of rivals out there, there's always something to take the place of a title that's fallen by the way side.
A lot of the magazines mentioned in this thread - SFX, Interzone, even Horse & Pony - survive because they are 'niche'. The publisher knows, roughly, that they'll continue to sell XX number of copies for the forseeable and budgets the editorial budget accordingly. It's a very different situation for the 'general' magazines - like NUTS. They depend on a high volume of sales not only because their costs are high (print run and paying to photograph all those models) but because the high sales justifies high ad costs, which is a revenue stream niche magazines don't benefit from, because of their low sales (they don;'t get many ads).
When I was at Marvel UK any advertising in Doctor Who Magazine was a bonus and was not a factor in the title's continued production. But if your sales start to fall and you can't charge big money for ad space, then the writing's on the wall.
The "lads mags" sector has been in decline for years. Why buy a magazine when you can get your fix of what Nuts had to offer at the click of a mouse?
) Even their website has shut down,I never bought the mag but my brother did buy the odd issue & i cant help feeling Co-op's insistence on the mag being placed in modesty bags last year contributed to its demise somehow along with the net.
