Wood Working Magazines - Any recommendations?

[Steve N]

Furniture & Cabinetmaking Freir Furniture and Cabinet Making


Cabinetmaking & Millwork Freir Cabinet making and Millwork

Cleaned up a few loose [ items
]

PS what Bob said, he lived it.....

[bhh]

If you're just starting out in woodworking, one of the first skills you'll need to develop is a good BS detector.

What Bob Flexner calls the "half-right rule."   Half of what you read (about finishing) is true, you just don't know which half.

I picked up a copy of FWW at the library last week.   One article was on half-lap miter joints -- all by hand.   Geez.   I have a table saw and a tenon jig, there's no reason to fuss with all the fine hand tuning by chisel that the author suggests.   Nothing against the hand tool guys, but use the tools that are most efficient for the job - hand or power, depending on the job.

[handi]

Bob, I respect your work, but with all due respect, it is a fact that beginners spend the money for magazines and experienced Woodworker's do not. If that was not the case, then readers of Wood, or Woodworker's Journal would automatically move subscriptions to Fine Woodworking as they progressed. When I was in that stage 20 years back, FWW definitely covered higher skill projects. (May be different today)

I see the same with the plans I sell. Jig and fixture plans sell well, simple project plans sell OK, but the high end project plans sell poorly at best. By the time someone is ready to tackle an Envelope Table or Serving Stand, more often than not, they can work out their own plans. 

Higher end projects simply cannot be properly explained in 4-8 pages. My plans run 20-36 pages and again, high end furniture simply does not sell well.

[Bob Lang]

. . . it is a fact that beginners spend the money for magazines and experienced Woodworker's do not.

Beginner's spend a lot of the money, but not all of it. Part of that is they are easy prey for both authors and vendors. The best way to sell something to a woodworker is to first convince him/her that they can't possibly do what they want to do without your magazine, book, or gizmo. My point is that content producers who aim for the beginner market inevitably lose their audience.  When publishers and personalities aim low and aren't in it for the long haul, the stuff produced will have no lasting value.

If we all aimed a little higher we wouldn't lose the audience right when they begin to understand what's important and what isn't. The publishing industry would be a lot healthier and guys looking for challenging content would have something to read.

[Derek Cohen]

Right Bob. 

I actually find the way the builds are written up to be a turn off. 

I am not interested in a cut list or a plan. I am experienced enough to work those out for myself. In any event, I have no desire to copy someone else's work (the only piece I have copied was Han's Wegner's "The Chair", where the challenge was to make an exact copy). 

What I am interested in is the design process, joinery, and build technique (both hand and power). 

I also seek inspiration - not to woodwork, since that is burned into me already - but, to observe the mind of others, the sparks that lit the fire, and be challenged by this. As an amateur, I have the luxury of not having to meet a deadline, a quota, or a price (within reason). This is freedom to explore and create. Plans and cut lists are shackles.

It becomes increasingly evident to me that a magazine - the way we currently view one - cannot meet this need. On-line magazines, with video content, are the way forward. As mentioned, there needs to be content aimed at the Intermediate to Advanced amateur.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Bentley]

Has anyone noticed that the projects and furniture in ALL woodworking magazines hasn't changed in the past thirty years? You can pick up an issue of Wood from 1987 and compare the furniture they made back then to today's issue of Wood. It's the same type of furniture! Which goes back to my earlier post. If you want to inspire new people into woodworking, you need to put stuff in the magazine that people actually want to make.

The trend today is farm house style with ruff edges and recycled material. A lot of woodworkers find that style beneath them and will ridicule if they ever see it, but walk into Pottery Barn or Restoration Hardware and that is all you'll see inside their stores. Why not have an article about making a farm house table with recycled wood using traditional joinery instead of pocket screws? Paint it up with milk paint and sand through it to show age? "No, lets instead put a weaved picnic basket on the front of our magazine. That'll make people buy it." What a joke!

Bentley

[handi]

So what is the solution? ANYONE can publish today, I have three printed books available on my website and on Amazon. They cost me NOTHING to actually publish. They are published on demand by Amazon when ordered. They sell ok at best, I make about $5 per month royalties for each book, but the work is long since done. Amazon, through their CreateSpace program makes this easy to do. They provide a shopping cart page you can link to from your site to sell the book direct, they ALSO list it on Amazon.com and you can buy copies yourself for the printing cost and sell them in person. Here is how it breaks down:

Books must be 24 pages or more. You can choose the size and many options for printing, covers, etc.
My books are 24-30 pages, with full color and glossy covers (see them here)

My Sand Shading book:  I set the price at $12.99. Amazon, in this case, sets a minimum sale price at $9.43 to insure costs are paid through the various sales channels. I can buy the book physically for $3.50 each plus shipping. 

If I sell it through the shopping cart they provide for me (they collect money, pay taxes,etc and simply send me my share) I make $6+ per copy. 

If THEY sell it through Amazon.com, I get $4+ per copy.

I also chose expanded distribution, which allows for wholesale sales to book stores and other resellers. I get less than $2 for those sales. 

The books are sold in the US, UK, Japan and Germany.

I have also made them available on Kindle.

So ANYONE can publish the higher end content they wish, without having to build a publishing business, but how many will you sell at $9+ per copy?

I personally think it is worth doing, and will keep releasing titles, but it is NOT a road to riches. 

Anyone who wants to know more about Amazon CreateSpace is free to PM me and I will gladly share my "expertise" with you.

[handi]

I will also add that much the same situation I described above for publishing applies now to video outside YouTube.

Less than a month ago my new 1/2 hour, project based woodworking TV show began streaming on Amazon Prime. It is free for Prime members and I even made it free to watch for folks without Prime memberships, but Amazon will tack on some ads. Woodcademy TV My first episode is available to watch now and the second will be streaming shortly, probably this week.

While the time and effort required to produce a half-hour of video is not insubstantial (it certainly is) my investment is mostly in time since I already shoot and produce videos for my self, Freud, Bessey, Teknatool, MicroJig and others. I currently shoot with a Nikon D5100 DSLR, in a rented 800 sq ft shop, so most folks reading this could do the same.

Like CreateSpace, it costs me nothing to publish my video on Amazon, although they do have a lot of pretty stringent requirements about format, advertising and closed captioning that you must meet.

I can choose to charge for watching the show, pretty much whatever I want to, but I choose not to. My primary goal at the moment is to see how many people and hours I can get to stream. If I charged, I would get paid about 55% of the fee, with Amazon collecting the rest. At no charge, Amazon pays me $0.15 per hour streamed, so for month 1 I will make around $7.50 Obviously, my real goal is to prove the audience and get corporate sponsors.

The main reason I chose to go this route was to delve deeper into the detail of woodworking that many here have noted a lack of in the magazines. Video is FAR more powerful a teaching tool than print ever can be. If a picture is worth a thousand works, how many words is 30 minutes of video worth?

Is this the future of education for the next generation of woodworking enthusiasts? I have no idea. I think it might be, and right now I am the only one doing it, so I can get a lot more attention faster before a bunch of others jump on board, so it should be fun to see what happens.

[tnff]

Bob, I respect your work, but with all due respect, it is a fact that beginners spend the money for magazines and experienced Woodworker's do not. If that was not the case, then readers of Wood, or Woodworker's Journal would automatically move subscriptions to Fine Woodworking as they progressed. When I was in that stage 20 years back, FWW definitely covered higher skill projects. (May be different today)
...

I'm not Bob but perhaps can inject my thoughts here.  In my view the jump from Wood to FWW is too huge.  I consider myself an intermediate amateur and so the content covered by Wood for example doesn't interest me.  Yet I find FWW to be too, for lack of a better word, hoity-toity.  When I pick of FWW, I feel like it's speaking with the woodworking equivalent of Thurston Howell III and I'm Gilligan.  Basically there is no magazine out there today for me and woodworkers like me.  The intermediate amateur who  has moved beyond the basic content of most magazines but who has neither the time, nor resources to move to the FWW level.

Interestingly this discussion would be very appropriate to most of the hobby magazines I subscribe to.  Just remove "woodworking" and substitute "Model Railroading" or "Fishing" or "Hunting" and the discussion is the same.  You no longer have folks like Homer Circle who were outdoorsmen doing outdoor writing either.

jim

[Steve N]

Has anyone noticed that the projects and furniture in ALL woodworking magazines hasn't changed in the past thirty years?

Give me examples of mainstream furniture styles that have changed, or are new in the last 100 years. That would also answer your question. Furniture styles change rather slowly. The other half of that is magazines are geared for people with less experience for the most part, and while they do want to make furniture themselves, they also want to make projects they can accomplish. That would make Shaker, which has fairly easy joinery, straight easy to cut lines, as your most frequent entry, G&G, Stickley, and others that require less knowledge, and craft to make. What you hardly ever see is Queen Anne with cabriole legs, Federal with all of it's angles, and inlays. Those guys don't fall into the "I can do that" mode. A magazine would be very well received by guys who did want to make an entire Queen Anne tall chest, but they number few, and the magazine with very poor sales numbers is also the one who drops from existence.