Early on, I gave up on all the usual business practices. First of all, I was never a student of business practice. And I never had a business plan for the magazine. It oversimplifies it to say I just started one day out of the blue. But its not far from the truth. Then once I started, I stumbled along trying to do the things I thought one had to do in a business way. I tried to sell ads for each issue. In the beginning I did sell a few and I felt guilty about it. I knew that there was little chance any advertiser would recoup their modest ad fee. It would have been more honest just to ask for a donation. I also found it was a big energy drain. The phrase I settled on was that selling ads was a soul-sucking exercise. I also paid to advertise the magazine in a few other places. Didnt everything require advertising? I bought space in Utne Reader, for instance. I wrote ad copy. I even did a small bulk mailing to portion of The Sun magazines subscriber list. It was done with Sy Safranskys blessing; Id met him once and he was kind enough to encourage me. This all took considerable time and energy. Eventually, I realized it wasnt paying off and I stopped bothering with it. In spite of such sobering discoveries, there were little blessings that kept coming along that encouraged me. Some of them came in the of form of offers to swap subscriptions. Someone from the Jung Journal (published quarterly by the San Francisco Jung Institute) asked if Id trade subscriptions. Of course, I was happy to do that and that arrangement has continued for over 15 years. I was surprised to get a request from Bookforum asking for a subscription swap. That has continued now for over ten years. But I was most tickled when about eight years ago I got a request from the Kandinsky Library at the Centre Pompidou in Paris to swap subscriptions. Now four times a year I receive Les Cahiers du musée national dart moderne. Its in French, of course, which I dont read so well. But I can say that the Museum of Modern Art at the Pompidou Center in Paris gets each issue of works & conversations. Such are the little blessings that help keep a small, unaffiliated, grass-roots, totally independent art journal afloat.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 00:29:36 +0000
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