April 17, 2007
The Great Experience.1
One of the most satisfying things about running a magazine is getting copies hot off the press and being able to look at the fruit of two month's labor. The new (May/June) issue arrived this morning. It's always fun to see the Fed Ex truck drive up these country roads and into our driveway at the office.
This issue is really cool, in my humble opinion. I'm pretty happy with the live color photo used for an HM subscription ad. I also used a giant ink stain blob on a spread on Comeback Kid. There were two stories that were late or unresponsive to my photo requests for some reason and I was licking my chops. I had recently purchased some black paint and experimented with some splatter effects, and I was just chomping at the bit to use it. I did this once with a comic book in junior high. I had a series with the word "boot" in it. I can't exactly recall the title. And the fourth edition boasted that it was a very special issue ... and when you opened up the folded page to see the comic, there was a giant, moist looking ink blob (made from real ink) that even make the "sweerrrk" sound as the sticky inked pages released the sticky bond it held with the opposite page. There was a big "OOPS!" at the bottom to indicate a printer's error. I always liked that. I was even going to fish it out of storage to scan for this ink blob idea, but bought some paints instead. David Allen, a former Managing Editor that was a killer designer/graphic artist for us, used a blob once for a spread piece on Showbread.
So, there's that blob spread, the next spread features a very dense black photo of BRMC, so it almost carries a "Heavy Ink" vibe from page to page. The poster is amazing. Anyway, I'm thrilled with this issue. It should have been a best-of-the-year issue as far as ad sales (at least that was our expectations going in), but it tanked in that category, with a lot of labels that usually jump in heavy to marketing their new bands at the big GMA week gathering, where our magazine is on display. I hear reports each year from the people stocking the display that HM is probably the fastest-moving title that they have to keep replenishing. I guess the labels are experiencing low sales shock or are changing the way they look at print ads. Instead of scaling back this issue at the last second (cuz we close our ad sales right around the same time that the magazine is wrapping up), but I decided to take a step of faith and keep all the stories for the planned 96-page issue. Here's hoping that it's a hit.
