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

Advertise This

In Takimag, the great statistician and social scientist Steve Sailer notices something about advertising we've suspected for a few years now. Sailer tells us how he worked in marketing research in the 1980's. He says:

...in the second half of the 1980s, clients started to complain that very few of our tests showed that increasing TV advertising by 50 or 100 percent would move the needle on sales at all.

Sailer tells us that:

This is not to say that good advertising couldn’t help a new brand, but there tended to be diminishing returns once an identity was established.

We really agree with the above.

Sailer goes on to say how he encouraged companies to cut advertising to see what happened. The advertisers didn't want to, of course.

We've cut our advertising budget drastically over the years. Basically, we think we've established our brand, and our fans are going to buy our books regardless. Advertising does not seem very effective these days at bringing in new customers.

Our most successful book had the most advertising. We assumed  this was both correlation and causation. The book was Israel Strikes.  But what if the subject was just so interesting to readers and so timely that most of the advertising wasn't really necessary? Frankly, we wonder. Back then we kept meticulous daily data on sales and ad debuts, both print and digital. When new ads went up sales spiked.

But still.

Going back now, we ran plenty of print and digital ads for A Line Through the Desert. They didn't work and throughout the winter of 2009-2010 we wondered if we had made a bad career move.

Our next book was To Defend the Earth. Here we started digitally and moved on into print. Much to our surprise we moved product everyday. It was wonderful.

Then came Israel Strikes. When this book came out in early 2013 we bought digital ads and print ads in military history magazines. It occurred to us that they have military history magazines in Britain. So we went and bought a lot of ads over there. Voila! Where before we had few fans in the UK now we have thousands. In fact, per-capita we're more popular in the UK than in the USA. Thanks Limeys!

But here again we seem to have hit our ceiling and new ads just don't seem to be making much of an impression. To restate, saturation doesn't help. We've also tried running ads a few years after the last ad, thinking this would grab reader attention and gain new fans. Sorry, nope. There seems to be an absolute limit to an ads effectiveness regardless of time.

Our own rule now is one and done. One ad for a new book in a particular platform and then get out.

Actually, with World War 1990: ANZACs, we'll be running a little advertising experiment, so we'll see.

The Media is Decadent and Depraved

We'll let the indispensable Takimag describe the Russian exploits of Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and his partner in Crime Mark Ames. A sample:

One article described how the staff’s female workers were being forced into giving Ames and Taibbi oral sex in exchange for employment:



We have been pretty rough on our girls. We’d ask our Russian staff to flash their asses or breasts for us. We’d tell them that if they wanted to keep their jobs, they’d have to perform unprotected anal sex with us. Nearly every day, we asked our female staff if they approved of anal sex.

It gets so much worse.

As noted before, Matt Taibbi now writes at Rolling Stone.

These bastards lecture us nornies on right and wrong?

We believe one can learn a lot about someone's character just by watching them for a few minutes. Creeps usually let their creepiness show through. Here's Mr. Ames on the right:

Here's Taibbi:

We think these guys look like they should be playing the pedo-killers in Michael Douglas' The Star Chamber.  Darkness hands over them. We're not kidding.

With respects to Small Dead Animals blog, ladies and gentlemen: you moral and intellectual superiors.