A Conversation with David Rose: Little Magazine Veteran and Publisher of Lapham’s Quarterly
“I hear the argument, Oh, these poor little magazines with their tiny readerships, if only people appreciated them more. It’s partly true. But the bigger side of that is, well, if only you knew how to read a budget. If only you actually knew anything about publishing.”
.. The notion that as long as the editorial quality is good, it will sell is kind of a Field of Dreams logic — if you build it, they will come. I’ve worked in magazines for 18 years now, and it’s never been the case that as long as you have a good editorial product you can sell the magazine. In fact, the opposite is true: You can have a terrible editorial product, and you can sell the magazine as long as the business makeup is sound. Shelves at supermarkets are evidence of that.
.. It’s increasingly difficult, for example, to get good ad sales staff on magazines. Nobody knows how to do it. To find someone who actually knows about the mechanics of circulation is impossible. You just can’t do it.
.. Not one of the magazines that you’ve mentioned will be able to tell you, for example, what their renewal rate is on conversion.2 I’d be very surprised if one of these magazines was able to tell you what a conversion rate was.
.. You get into situations where interns aren’t paid. I think that’s disgraceful. All of these magazines, except for The Baffler, take interns, and not one of them pays. I think that’s absolutely appalling. There’s no reason for that other than bad management. If you can’t afford the staff, you shouldn’t have the staff.3 It’s encouraging only one type of person to come through the system, and that’s the person who can afford taking an unpaid internship. There is nobody from a nontraditional background emerging through the system.
.. O’DONOVAN: For the most part, would you say small magazines should be supported by subscribers — that the majority of revenue should come from the subscriber base?
ROSE: That is never true, and certainly has never been true in this sector at all. All these magazines — and I’m talking right across Europe and in the U.S. — magazines in this sector, which we will broadly call the cultural literary sector, are completely dependent on deep pockets.Take away the donations, take away the private investments if they’re not nonprofit, and they are completely dependent on private investors. And they are massively loss making. The London Review of Books, I think the latest figure, they’re in debt to the Wilmers trust to the tune of 27 million pounds. The idea that these magazines can ever be self-sustaining is a fundamentally false one. They can’t.