William Stroock Feature Creep

Alert reader(s) will have noticed the new sidebar feature  containing 11 magazine articles we've written over the years for the Sovereign Media Group of magazines. The only article missing is a big spread we did about the South Africans at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale.

El Cid was the first piece we ever published with Sovereign Media and we were vey excited about it.

[Hey look, another Charleton Heston reference-Ed]

That was a breakthrough for us as previously something like 90% of our pieces were in the Decision Games group, whose editors we are not speaking to becuase they stiffed us after we designed the Meuse-Argonne Folio game. I hope they're happy with the way that relationship ended, becuase I'm not.

Aspiring writers, Rule #1 of this business is Get Paid.

Anyhoo, we wrote a pair of Civil War pieces for them, something we'd never thought we'd get in to. Sherman's March to the Sea was particularly gratifying, and not just becuase we share the same initials as the great general. We wrote 5,000 words in the week before our trip to DC in 2016.

We ended up writing a few articles on the war in Burma (something like eight overall) a very complicated subject. But we already had the books so why not? Also, pronounce Mytykyna, we dare you.

Indian Victory in Bangladesh came after General Sam Maneksaw died in 2008 and we thought, who, what?

We wrote Soviets in Afghanistan out of pure curiosity.

The Koreans in Vietnam was interesting. Communist pro-tip: the South Korean Army includes half an hour of TKD with their morning PT. Never close with the SoKos. We touched on some of this in our short story, Tye Die Warrior.

Still Glossy

Last week we discussed Steve Sailer's excellent Takimag article about advertising. He made a great point about print magazines:

Have you noticed that a remarkable number of print magazines are still around in 2017? After the crash of 2008, I expected magazine racks to be empty by now. But apparently, glossies remain a good way to make expensive stuff look glamorous.

Print magazines not only survived 2008, they multiplied. For example my old bosses at Decision Games, publishers of Strategy & Tactics,  have stubbornly expanded. In 2008 they launched World at War. They followed this up in 2010 with Modern War. Now they're launching Strategy & Tactics Quarterly.

Now Decision Games sells a war game with each magazine so their business model is slightly different than say, Cosmo's or Newsweek's.

But has the reader noticed that a copy of Newsweek looks awfully thin?

We can't speak for Cosmo. [Yeah...sure-Ed]

Other history magazines that don't offer games are still printing at the same rate with the same number of pages. Our current bosses at Sovereign Media crank out Military Heritage, Civil War, WWII, and several special issues a year.

Actually to say one outfit is a former boss and one a current boss is a bit misleading.

[You misleading? No-Ed]

All we really mean is we don't write for Decision Games anymore, don't ask [I wasn't going to -Ed] while we still write for Sovereign Media.

The economics of the business haven't changed much in the ten years since the crash. They still rely on a lot of freelancers [that's you, Will-Ed] and the rates for articles haven't changed much.

We advertise our books in those same magazines  and those rates haven't changed much either.

Actually, we thought the shuttering of Borders would strike a major blow to the print magazine business. Borders was where we discovered the above mentioned magazines, after all. Interestingly the publishers have just found other places to sell. Anyone else notice the great expansion of the magazine shelves at the supermarket?

So even after ten years the demand for print magazines seems stable. The question is why.

Sailer notices this:

Paper periodicals will likely take a huge hit in the next economic downturn when luxuries become unaffordable again, but their continued survival today suggests that, despite all the theoretical advantages of personalized onscreen advertising, there’s something still not quite right about online ads.

Perhaps the same is true for digital copy?

We wrote the lead and designed Green Hell