Hi guys,
Well, there's quite a lot of speculation here, and there's probably not much I can say that will tamp that down. Needless to say, we don't have any plans to go all-digital. True, we decided to bundle the digital and print subs. There was no reason to keep them separate, especially with the shipping challenges USPS has been facing of late.
Adjusting the page count for the magazine was a tough decision, and one that we have struggled with for years. For the edtiorial staff, we chose to look at the change as an opportunity. We refocused the print magazine on how-to stories and shifted other stories to the website. The kit reviews are no longer bound by the print publication schedule. At least two new reviews appear every week on the website and are far more timely. Subscribers can access them all month long, rather than wait until the next month when the magazine arrives in the mail (email or otherwise). And yes, I understand that this makes those reviews unavailable to non-subscribers, but that's one of the benefits for subscribing.
Someone mentioned advertising, and I'd like to speak to that for a moment (and I'm only hitting the tippy top of the waves here). For a long time, print publishers each had a formula they used to compare page count to advertising pages in a magazine. Every publication had it's own ratio. Some went with a Cosmo-esque ratio (ad heavy as opposed to editorial), and others went editorial heavy (we were always on that side of things). Come the early 2000s, print advertising was absolutely crushed in the move to online ads. To keep going, print pubs (particularly small and mid-sized mags) basically had to do away with the ad-edit formulas, because if they didn't, the pubs would have been reduced to 6-page newsletters, and two or three of those pages would have been ads (hyperbole, but not by much). Obviously, maintaining a subscriber base for those would have been impossible. At the same time, reader habits were changing faster than reels on a slot machine, and this impacted subscription numbers. Balancing two revenue sources under extreme pressure with rising costs of shipping and printing coupled with with the obliteration of newsstand (a third revenue source) and extreme, monopolistic consolidation on the distribution front wiped out and continues to adversely affect print magazines from small indies to massive publishing houses. The industry saw a couple of dozen closures across many categories in 2020 alone, and COVID is not singularly to blame; it was a contributing factor, though, in the demise of several titles.
Dire, right?
Well, not entirely. Some corners of the publishing world have been able to better weather the chaos, but that doesn't mean they're immune. And, as I said earlier, we've adjusted and will keep adjusting, and FSM is in a good place right now. People seem to like to compare FSM and Scale Auto (SCA). The comparison to Scale Auto extends only as far as the similarity in subject matter and that both brands are owned by Kalmbach. I can't and won't bore you with the internal nitty gritty. The point is, where Scale Auto was and where FineScale is are worlds apart.
I have to get back to editing the Building Muscle Cars, Restomods, and Pro Touring special issue along with stories for July 2021. Stay safe, all of you. And if you want to submit a scale-modeling how-to story, don't be shy.
Tim