[FRIAM] Hacking Complexity - Book/Magazine...

[Tom Johnson]

One of the fundamentals of start-up magazine publishing, at least in the
traditional ink-on-paper sense, is that you have to have a very good idea of
how large is your pool of potential advertisers, what is their advertising
budget and how far out is that money committed?  Forget about reader
revenue; subscribers are a minor factor when it comes to paying  the bills.
And even then, I wonder how big the potential readership would be for such a
publication in English?  150?  1,500?  5,000? ¿Quien sabe?  (Steve Guerin:
How big is this listserv?)

Stereophile has natural advertising audiences, I suspect: recording
companies and equipment mfgrs.

So who would buy advertising in such a "publication" about Complexity and
related matters?  Yes, an occasional book publisher and maybe, in time, some
consulting firms selling Complexity as a solution to ??? but then.....

That said, traditional production costs look very different through the lens
of online publishing, eliminating much of the cost of traditional pre-press
(though good online publishing is still somewhat labor intensive; good copy
editors are a treasure) and all of the costs of ink, paper and distribution.

One approach might be to do the quality online publication with something
close to but not-rigid regularity, give away the content for the first X
days, but after that charge X dollars to download each article in PDF.  This
strategy, over time, would start to build a library of material that could
be used for teaching and by other interested parties.  Another strategy
could be to give away the first half of an article, but charge for the
remaining 50 percent.

In the distant past, I was the editor for Scientific American readers and
off-prints.  In the mid-'70s we were grossing about $1mill a year with very
little production cost (the content had already been paid for; resetting the
pages a minimal expense) and a couple guys in the warehouse doing the
picking and shipping.  I don't have the data, but I doubt that SA is even
doing the off-prints any longer.  Might it be that everybody in today's
digital universe expects to get what they need/want for free (e.g.
Wikipedia, or the Social Science Research Network -- http://www.ssrn.com/ )?

-tom johnson
(who still buys books and whose house overflows with magazines, some of
which I get around to reading)

On 7/31/06, steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
> I googled "Hacking Complexity" (as a quoted string) and only got 8 hit,
> and only one two occurences were used as titles rather than verbs...
>
> In the spirit of Wil McCarthy's novel "Hacking Matter", I suggest
> precisely that title for a book title.
>
> I should also mention (and I've talked privately with a few of you)
> that Larry Archibald, the early publisher of Stereophile magazine
> approached me about 5 years ago about his desire to start a magazine
> that essentially featured all things "Infomesa and SFI".   He has a
> reputation for high quality, professional-amatuer publishing...
> Larry brought Stereophile to NM nearly 25 years ago...  and he sees
> (saw?) the potential for something similar in this world...
>
> I told him the time was not quite ripe, that as things evolved, I'd let
> him know when they might be.   At the time Popular
> Complexity/Non-linear Science, etc had peaked (as most of the
> Employment sections in your resumes will indicate?) and things were
> sliding toward a precipice of loss of financial, if not popular
> support.
>
> To whatever extent, we are now coming up out of the "bottome" this
> might be a good time to engage him.
>
> What do you think about a bimonthly slick glossy (maybe following on
> the heels of a book) at the general technical level of Scientific
> American?
>
> Maybe there would be some motivation (call it pay and publication
> record) for all of us to take our well thought-out contributions here
> and turn them into something publishable in a more "Popular" venue.
>
> Thoughts?
> - Steve
>
>
>
==========================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
www.analyticjournalism.com
505.577.6482(c)                                 505.473.9646(h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com               tom at jtjohnson.com

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete."
                                                   -- Buckminster Fuller
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