Astra Magazine Had Creative Freedom and a Budget. It Wasn’t Enough | Hacker News Reader

Astra Magazine Had Creative Freedom and a Budget. It Wasn’t Enough

nytimes.com

16 pointslermontov16 comments

> Astra’s staff decided the magazine would be a 192-page full color book distributed through Penguin Random House, like the rest of Astra Publishing House’s titles. As a result, virtually any independent bookstore in the country would be able to stock it. And then, in an additional stroke of luck, Hudson News agreed to display the magazine at airports and train stations.

OK, they wanted to go the old-school route, which was wonderful, but it didn't work. As the article said, it never worked very well in terms of being profitable. That's not why you run a magazine like that.

There are lots of other business models for literary writing nowadays, usually Web-only, none of which produce very much revenue, but at least they wouldn't have lost as much.

It's a shame every endeavour needs to fit into a capitalism-shaped hole. There are many things that people agree are beneficial but won't be profitable.

Yeah, there are outlets for charitable non-profits, or educational publications, or just plain vanity projects (like The Nation magazine which has never turned a profit). So it's not as though you can't do something unprofitable at all.

They sold a grand total of 17,000 copies and this with original essays by noted writers. You have to sell at much higher volumes for something like this to be sustainable, as those writers and artists don't work for free.

It doesn't sound to me like they thought they were going to make money publishing it, rather the Astra Publishing wanted to raise its profile with what is essentially a low volume high quality loss leader. 9000 copies an issue is small volume, even if you sell it out, and whether distributed by random house or not 9000 just isn't that many.

Then at some point the economic realities hit Astra and they realized the PR project wasn't worth the amount of money they were spending keeping it going.

But it doesn't sound like it was ever organized to make money.

Yeah, a loss leader is fine, as long as you can afford the losses.

I should have added: a "loss leader" in a grocery store is something that draws in the customers, but then they buy other things that makes up for the losses. Apparently Astra expected more than they were getting.

https://archive.ph/oCAMj

even better if you never wanna deal with paywalls again:

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...

The irony of bypassing the paywall to an article talking about publications dying and how hard it is for publications to make money.

Most media sites lower their paywall for archive.org for altruistic reasons. I wonder if there is some kind of compromise where the paywall only goes down after X days (presumably most interest occurs within the first few days publishing). It would still service the archival mission, but would diminish the use of the archive as a bypass of the paywall. It won't help if the basic economics aren't there. And maybe the free-readers wouldn't read anyway on average if the paywall remained (the old napster argument). But it might be a good compromise on the margin.

Yes but this isn't archive.org.

yes it is

Please cite your sources.

ah! wow, i always assumed this but just learned that i am wrong. thanks

You're welcome, I wasn't entirely sure but I was 99% sure this wasn't run by archive.org, that's why I asked for a reference.

lol i buy struggling broke ass literary magazines though

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