word on the street 5 uses its newsletter, The Dunker, as a way to build a community and make its brand more important to people’s lives. And that’s the path that’s going to give independent magazines the way to grow their brand – being able to talk directly to their customers. That’s how you begin to harness purpose. The newsstand COVID should have shaken us out of the complacent belief that the newsstand can support us. With the newsstand, you’re relying on so many things to go right. You’re relying on a great relationship with your distributor, on people having prior knowledge of your magazine, on someone finding your magazine in a crowded newsstand… and in the case of independent magazines, the expense. You’re trying to sell a magazine for £10, next to a mag at a few quid. There are so many barriers. It’s heartbreaking to see people go into newsstand, realise it’s much more expensive than they thought, print a load of copies because their distributors told them to and then sell 5% of what they put out. But it’s not because their magazine is ‘bad’ – it’s because that’s not how it works. It hasn’t worked for a long time. I’m not a newsstand snob. I’m trying to say you need a vibrant way of thinking about how your magazine can be distributed, have a detached calmness about how you choose to build your audience, and always be focused on as many connection points as you can have. One of the things I hope will emerge is subscriptions. During the pandemic, people started buying magazines on subscription again, and lots of publishers saw sales going up – particularly genres like homes and interiors, which became a really vibrant category. I also think ecommerce is beginning to be normalised now and I think customers are okay with it. It’s so prevalent in the industry, and I think the independents can start thinking about it in new ways. This can be quite daunting when you’re an independent publisher, but it has to be the future for the independent magazine sector, whether that’s unifying and sharing best practice, or simplifying the process. Subscription models are very technical, and I think that frightens a lot of people. While my heart would definitely move towards print, I think we’re going to have to use digital to collect our communities. It’s a happy way of bringing it all together. The demise of advertising income means we’ve got to concentrate on the customer. If you’re relying on your customer, not on a third party, that’s a really good place to be. That’s how we live going forward– speaking directly to customers. The future I always think, ‘Let’s be positive. Let’s get up in the morning and give it a go. Let’s remind ourselves how great we are and how much good stuff we produce.’ Maybe spend a bit of time on that. I’m not trying to sort of brush anything under the carpet or claim that it’s not difficult at times, but I think it’s a lovely industry. Sometimes we talk ourselves into the doom and gloom, which doesn’t always feel warranted. 25 years ago I remember people saying that books were going to die. Or more recently, that the iPad was going to kill magazines. Neither has happened. I read a really good book recently, about the problems with AI. How you can’t tell the difference between AI and us, and whether we should become more like robots: work harder, be more productive, send more emails. We even use all this tech that makes us more like robots. That’s us trying to compete with computers, and we’re losing. In fact, we’ve already lost. We cannot win that fight. What we can win is the fight of being more human. We can win the fight by actually speaking to someone, or by being yourself. The more human we are, the more likely we are to come up with creative stuff. You don’t need to follow a Californian nine-step productivity programme to become more ‘agile’. Just trust your instincts. I think in publishing, resilience is more important than productivity. Resilience gets you there. Resilience is the ability to pick yourself up when things go wrong, the ability to be open minded and keep going. Productivity will exhaust you; it will not make you more human. With resilience, if you really want to do it, if you believe in it, you will find a way. We have to make a call about what’s important right now. And so… For me, it comes down to purpose. When you have purpose, you can unify around it, and find your community. It gives you a reason to find your readers, it gives you reasons to talk to them, reason to engage. When you understand your purpose and align it to the needs of your customers, then you have the magic. Magazine Street host Kerin has been part of the magazine industry for almost 30 years, running titles such as ‘Maxim’ and ‘Men’s Fitness’ and launching ‘The Week Junior’ in 2015. He is now CEO of Atlas, a subscriptions consultancy.
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