Over All Rating Reviews :
These authors were both so generous with their time (and their syllabi) with me--and put me in touch with other magazine journalism teachers who are doing good work--while they were buried themselves in the work of the revision. They get that magazines (and all print journalism, by the way) are not dying out by any means. The revenue models are shifting; yes. And some titles aren't tracking their own markets well enough to stay afloat. But new ones are coming alive almost every day. (Just check out the local bookstore--which, if it's a good one, just keeps adding aisles for more magazines. And thank God for Amazon.com, which can make them all findable and subscribable at the touch of a key. They're getting nichier and more personal (O (Oprah), Martha Stewart Living, Lavender, Plenty...the list is endless), and thanks to the Web, more people everywhere are finding them and subscribing to them--even the ones that are online only.
And the barriers to entry into magazine publishing (as well as book publishing) are practically gone. It's now so cheap and easy to publish that smart people with a good idea are launching magazines out of their bedrooms with staffs located all over the world, using tools like InDesign, Adobe Acrobat Pro, and Virtual Ticket.
And these out-of-the-box publishers are reinventing mastheads, like Wired did a decade ago. Titles like creative director instead of editor or editorial director. And they're decentralizing authority, because you really CAN do better, more, and faster if you share.
Take James Patterson, the most prolific writer in the country today and a heck of a brand of his own, who realized he could get more of his ideas into print if he collaborated. According to USA Today on Feb. 5, 2007 ("Publishing Juggernaut Patterson Keeps Rolling Along," page 1) Patterson has six novels coming out this year. Four were written with co-authors, including "Step on a Crack," which comes out today. He wrote or co-wrote eight novels among the 100 most popular books of 2006, based on USA Today's Best-Selling Books list. (The author of the USA Today article, Bob Minzesheimer, suggests Patterson might be publishing's answer to Henry Ford. But Ford's idea was economy and volume over beauty and individuality. These books are all unique.)
And Patterson wants to share what he knows, like Prijatel and Johnson (which, by the way, is how the Internet took off and why Bill Gates won't win in the end.) He is developing a "studio system for writers," according to Michal Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown, who has edited 20 of Patterson's 39 books (as quoted in Minzesheimer's article), "contrary to the image of 'the lonely writer in a garret.'" James Patterson Entertainment has five full-time employees (two of them "embedded" at Little, Brown, Patterson's publisher, according to its president) and is aimed at turning Patterson's ideas into movies as well as books. He's trying to midwife books by helping compatible writers find each other and produce books together, as Patterson himself has done. (If anyone's out there who wants to do this with me, please see contact info below. I want to do this too or I'll never get my own ideas into print.)
And he's sharing the boatloads of money coming in too: Last year he founded the PageTurner Awards, and donated $[...] to schools, libraries, community groups and others who "promote the excitement of books." Next month he'll announce winners of another $[...] in awards, saying he wanted to "find and reward people who spread the joy of reading."
(When I was editor of The History Channel Magazine--its own brilliant brand extension, and a great, if artificially limited success story--I selected from the annual winners of National History Day--an awesome national program designed to get middle-school and high-school-age kids into history--and published their articles in the magazine. I paid them the same thing my limited budget permitted me to pay professional writers--$[...] for a [...]-word article--called it a scholarship and honored the student in the pages of the magazine. I got great (abundantly factchecked and revised) articles out of it for no more money than I'd have paid an experienced historian, and those kids got a license to continue following their interests (and a great clip for their portfolios, by the way, and a college recommendation from me). It'll be fun to see what they end up doing after college. If any of your are listening, drop me a line at the email address below.)
I love the closing paragraph of Minzesheimer's article, in which Patterson describes his "Maximum Ride" series for teens: "Give them a story they like, and you can turn them on to reading. Make them read something like "Crime and Punishment" and you can turn them off. They can move on to other books later, but first, you've got to turn them on to reading."
Case in point: When I took my 12-year-old son on a trip to England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales six years ago, we were on a ferry headed to the Orkney Islands with the most spectacular scenery imaginable all around us, and guess what my son was doing? His face was buried in the latest, Scottish edition of one of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. It killed me that he was never a reader, despite all the reading I'd done with him--until J.K. Rowling. Now he's a freshman magazine journalism student at Drake University, where Pat Prijatel leads the program and can work her magic on him.
Congratulations to Prijatel and Johnson for delivering to all of us this great book, and thanks to both of them for their generous and selfless contributions to our industry. And particular thanks to Pat Prijatel for passing on what she knows to my son, whose future is terrificly bright--in no small measure because of her.
Terry Monahan
president, Calibre Companies
terry@monahan.cc
612/866-9637;
cell: 612/501-5218
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