Wood Working Magazines - Any recommendations?

[Steve N]

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

Go look through you tube. You Sir are the MAJORITY of woodworkers out there, and there are huge numbers just like you who aren't served by the content the magazines decide you will accept. You tube is rapidly becoming the outlet where the creative juices of all of the guys like you can show what they have done. As some of them are cornballs so it's a darn sight more entertaining than any magazine editorial humor I have ever read.

As with anything that explains "the correct way to do........" You need to hone your BS monitor, and think is that safe????when you see something you aren't sure about.

[handi]

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

But Jim, the REAL question is would you PAY to read such a magazine? My experience is not enough folks like you would. The problem the magazines face is that as woodworkers advance in their craft, they tend to widely diverge in the types of projects that interest them. Every home needs basic book shelves and every new shop needs largely the same jigs and fixtures, but once you get past the basic learning projects and begin to challenge yourself with more involved projects, what will you choose? Queen Anne Style? Federal? Mission? French Provincial?

It is like the tree we use, beginning with a main trunk that is reasonably simple, but quickly branching out into finer and finer distinctions. At some point not too far beyond the main branches, there simply are not enough paid readers to support the publication of an entire magazine. Take a look at my Envelope Game Table article from WWJ- Oct 2010. It is certainly an intermediate project, and was published to take some advantage of the poker craze prevalent at the time, but as far as I know, no one has yet built the piece from the original magazine article, nor purchased the expanded plans I sell for it.

Were I an editor, having tried the article and gotten little or no response to it, I would probably not bother accepting another similar proposal.

[Bob Lang]

Just because anyone can publish doesn't mean that everyone should. What has happened in the last few years is that more and more people are pushing out the easy to produce content. One of the arguments I repeatedly lost while working in the publishing industry was that we should aim higher and abandon the stuff that everyone was putting online for free. That basic, beginner content was the bread and butter for magazines in the days before blogs and YouTube, and the industry can't let go of the notion that what sold in the past is what will sell in the future. Why would anyone pay for that when they can get it for free? If you're a content producer, or want to be one, it's about as easy to get published in a magazine (or get a book published) as it is to post a video on YouTube. Traditional publishing companies are aiming lower, not higher and there aren't many editors around who can tell the difference between good content and fluff. There aren't many good authors willing to settle for the tiny slice of pie that is left.

The future will likely be in independent publishing. This thread shows that there are people looking for better content than current magazine fare, the problem is how to connect authors to readers. Good content exists, but it can be hard to find due to the sheer volume of not-so-good content. McDonalds sells a lot of hamburgers, but that doesn't mean that well they sell is the best, or that imitating their business model will get you anywhere.

[handi]

Bob, 

I agree with folks WANTING better content, the question is will they PAY directly for it, or if not, how will it get paid for? 

This is why I am experimenting with Woodcademy TV on Amazon. I am not charging for it since I am convinced folks will NOT pay directly to view it. But if I can get enough viewers and show reasonable streaming numbers, then there are opportunities to pay for the shows indirectly. 

But somewhere, some how, content has to be paid for by someone. The most reliable path to this so far in publishing has been to cater to the lowest common denominator.

And imitating McDonald's model has made a whole bunch more folks rich than making high end burgers has, and for exactly the same reasons I have been discussing.

[Steve N]

Interesting thread, keep going guys

[tnff]

But Jim, the REAL question is would you PAY to read such a magazine? My experience is not enough folks like you would. The problem the magazines face is that as woodworkers advance in their craft, they tend to widely diverge in the types of projects that interest them. Every home needs basic book shelves and every new shop needs largely the same jigs and fixtures, but once you get past the basic learning projects and begin to challenge yourself with more involved projects, what will you choose? Queen Anne Style? Federal? Mission? French Provincial?

It is like the tree we use, beginning with a main trunk that is reasonably simple, but quickly branching out into finer and finer distinctions. At some point not too far beyond the main branches, there simply are not enough paid readers to support the publication of an entire magazine. Take a look at my Envelope Game Table article from WWJ- Oct 2010. It is certainly an intermediate project, and was published to take some advantage of the poker craze prevalent at the time, but as far as I know, no one has yet built the piece from the original magazine article, nor purchased the expanded plans I sell for it.

Were I an editor, having tried the article and gotten little or no response to it, I would probably not bother accepting another similar proposal.

Yes, I would be willing to pay for it, providing the price was reasonable and the content was consistent enough in quality to be worth subscribing.  Quality has become so hit and miss, mostly miss, that I only buy a couple magazines a year off the rack because there is just nothing in 90% of them worth paying for.  The real question is what about young folks.  They have become so conditioned to expect things for free that they don't have  concept of value.  Electronic magazines have not figured out how to make the jump from print to electronic media yet and don't have the same user friendly handling that paper does.  Looking forward to the day when it can, but it's not there yet.  When it does get there, people will either not want to pay the same price as for a paper copy or will expect a lot more interactive content and video embedded as part of the magazine, article, or project.  Fully integrated, interactive content might be the way to go for future magazines.

jim

[handi]

Jim, I TOTALLY agree that NONE of the print magazines have successfully utilized online content yet.

I wrote an article for WWJ and we included some extra online content related to the project. The Print version of the magazine did not even mention the extra content, and worse, the digital copy did not either! It would have been SO EASY to include a link!

Unfortunately, the digital editions of the magazines are largely nothing more than PDF versions of the print. And even then, they are not printing links which would automatically become live in a PDF version. It is foolish.

Pricing of digital mags is off too. I know for a fact that the publisher saves much of the cost of the content because they shave no physical cost of printing nor mailing costs, but the digital subscription is the same price! If your digital magazine is just a scan of your print version, fine. Charge me less since it costs you less. Or charge me the same, but give me links to products shown in the photos, or make a photo a live link to a video clip of the cut. There are loads of options, but no one yet has, to my knowledge, tried anything interesting. The best I saw was an online article from WWJ where the photos were thumbnails that would automatically expand to large size when the cursor rolled over them.

[Greg Jones]

Unfortunately, the digital editions of the magazines are largely nothing more than PDF versions of the print. And even then, they are not printing links which would automatically become live in a PDF version. It is foolish.

Popular Woodworking's digital edition is a PDF, and what they have is by far my favorite format of what is available today. It doesn't require me to be online to read it, the links do work if I am online while reading it, I can annotate the PDF if I want to highlight/bookmark certain articles, PDFs are compatible with everything (even a printer!), and more.

Best yet, I don't need a proprietary application to view the PDF that may or may not be supported in the future. One example of this is Fine Woodworking's iOS app that hasn't been updated to a 64-bit app, and now will not work on iOS 11. My subscription is now worthless until the app is updated. Apple began informing developers to transition their iOS apps from 32- to 64-bit nearly 4 years ago, so who know if it will ever be updated?

[Bob Lang]

One of the things print magazines and book publishers have accomplished is to get us to think of them as commodities and put the value on the lowest possible price, not the value of the content. This is why you see the same articles cycling through and the same information presented by new faces. Keeping costs down is more important than ensuring that authors know what they're talking about so readers get some bang for their buck. These are businesses that have lost sight of what their product is, and they don't understand their audience.

For many years Fine Woodworking kept their subscription price much higher than everyone else. I didn't mind paying if I got at least one thing out of each issue that would save me time or show me how to do something new. I stopped paying when I wasn't even getting that. I recently got a "two years for one" offer from them and I interpret that as an indication they are committed to joining the other magazines in the race to the bottom. Why do what everyone else is doing when everyone else is losing subscribers and going out of business?

If the content is good, that is it enables you to grow your skills and do more challenging work more efficiently, it doesn't matter that the digital edition doesn't have costs for paper and ink; the purchase decision is made on the value of the information and what it can do for you. That's what I'm willing to pay for, and that's what the things I self-publish try to accomplish. My books cost more, but they will get you further down the road than the cheaper imitations that cover the same topics.

Woodworking publishers are a lot like woodworkers, they think that price is the only determining factor in a buying decision. This is the same tactical error that woodworkers make when they open a little cabinet shop and say "I'm going to make better cabinets than people can get from the big box store, and I'm going to sell them for less." In either enterprise that isn't the road to success. What we need is something new, but we won't get that by imitation.

[tnff]

I get some digital subscriptions professionally.  The current magazine reading software they use just isn't very reader friendly.  They haven't scaled magazine page size format to work on screen format very well, esp on my laptop & reader.  They need to think in terms of the new medium, not just putting a digital copy of the print version on line.