Books vs. Magazines

Sorry, there was a little bit of a pause there—I was away at the Alberta Magazine Conference, which was very fun and inspiring and also exhausting. Alberta is pretty and has some great magazines and magazine people. Then I came back and participated in Toronto Word on the Street the next day, also on behalf of the magazine world, and then I fell over.

Honestly this was all the most fun I have had at work in a while. I have been working at my magazine job for nearly two years now and the best parts are the most magazine-y parts—not the spreadsheets, not the money-collecting or even the newsletters and social media (although I do enjoy the newsletters and social media—not so much the spreadsheets and money-collecting), but the actual finding-out-about-magazines. After so many years in book-publishing, it has been wild to just stay in publishing and find out so much I didn’t know before. It’s like that dream where you find out your house has a room you didn’t know about. Except, of course, I knew the magazine room was there, I just didn’t know it was so vast and different from the room I was in before.

After two years (nearly), am I qualified to say anything about the difference between magazines and books, industry-wise? Probably not, but this is my newsletter.

The one huge huge difference is advertising. Everyone knows this if they think about it, but have you ever thought about it? Books have one audience—readers. If no one wants to read your book, you don’t make any money and the book fails. It’s linear. Magazines, or at least magazines with advertising—I guess some don’t have it—are in a kind of triangular relationship. Their main audience for the actual content is still readers but they also have to make the magazine appealing to advertisers, who are not exactly reading it per se (necessarily), but investing in it, in a way. What the advertisers actually want is access to the readers as well. In a perfect magazine triangle, the readers want the ads too—I really like the ads in some of my favourite mags, because they are well-curated and I am the just-right reader for them. Often those magazine ads are a useful way to find stuff I want to buy! But in less-perfect triangles, the content is kind of skewed towards making a comfortable place for ads to land, or else the ads seem out of place, or a little of both. Or content can alienate advertisers, rendering a magazine financially vulnerable. The triangle tugs out of whack for lots of reasons. It’s a really delicate balance that I’m just sort of getting to understand.

The other way mags differ from books is origin stories, which often dictates structure. Most book publishing ventures I know are mainly editorially motivated and while they would I guess like to make money, they are somewhat resigned to not doing so if they can create and publish the content they want and not actually go under. And while there are a fair number of magazines who take the same approach, there are also a good number that are entrepreneurial in spirit and in fact, for many years, it was a reasonable-ish business to own certain types of magazines. It is still a reasonable-ish type of business to own or run certain types of magazines if one is very savvy about it and makes a lot of very careful and smart business decisions. But if one really wanted to make great business decisions, publishing of any type might not be foremost.

And yet another way these two publishing ventures differ is aesthetic. Magazines are much more of a synthesis of content and design than books are. Books are designed, and beautifully designed books exist, but especially in the literary space, it is very common to have a gorgeous cover—or even just a pretty nice cover—and then just an adequate text block internally. Templates are not unheard of, and certainly standard fonts. I worked in one of the most design-intensive areas of book publishing—K-12 educational, second only to children’s fiction and non-fiction, I would guess—and it was beautiful to see what the designers could do when they were permitted, but there was a lot of pressure to keep things standard, save money, get on the grid. Magazines do way way less of that, are really relying on inventive design and visuals to keep the reader engaged, and the result is very different than what books have. Even if you just saw one page and couldn’t feel the paper, you’d almost never mistake a magazine for a book. The look is clear.

Something that still strikes me as wild, as a publishing professional lo these 23.5 years (yes, I confess it to you, dear Rose-coloured readers—I am very old) is that a platform-agnostic journeyperson like myself is somewhat rare. I meet a lot of people IN publishing who do not know very much or care very much about publishing as an industry, just their own tiny niche of it, or even just their own publication. Some of these were happy for publishing to go on around them and some were the folks who said things like, “She doesn’t need to be edited because she’s a good writer,” and “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just print the Word document instead of paying for formatting?” Fun times.

It goes the other way too, of course, in both books and magazines you encounter beautiful, exquisitely edited and designed publications that are apparently for no one—no marketing, no sales or business plan, no idea who the audience is. Honestly, I am more on that side—it’s so nice to make lovely things—but both are bad.

The saddest thing to me is isolation. When someone wants to painstakingly explain to me how their unique magazine has had some troubles since the pandemic, or what the price of paper is doing, or the challenges with Meta and Bill C-18 as if no one else is experiencing it, I feel sad that they might not know any other publishers, or realize that these are industry-wide problems. I feel like this happens more in magazines than in books, although I can’t quite figure out why that is. The nice thing about my job is that I can be a listening ear and also a connector with other folks who are dealing with the same stuff, because no one can help a publishing person like another publishing person. It’s a rough world, publishing, but also my absolute favourite.