Issue #18 - Focus Magazine - HOT OFF THE PRESSES!

[David Spivak-Focus Magazine]

David, are you any relation to TV newsman and magazine publisher Lawrence Spivak?

Not that I know of... I'm actually not related to any Spivak's. The Spivak side of my family (my father's side) is very small. If you lived in Tampa Bay, FL in the mid-late 1990s and you liked good Jewish deli food, my father owned a very popular and famous NY style deli in Tampa. It has since closed down, unfortunately. There are so few places left in the world to get a GREAT pastrami on rye.

[David Spivak-Focus Magazine]

It looks like a great issue David.

Thank you, Kirk!

[Greg Lockrey]

I think it would be fun to own an uncut and bound issue. The galleies (if that's the correct term) look cool.

[David Spivak-Focus Magazine]

I think it would be fun to own an uncut and bound issue. The galleies (if that's the correct term) look cool.

I dunno... the sheet sizes are HUGE. 25 x 38. Maybe in NYC our offices and apts are too small, but that's a pretty big piece of paper. To have 13 of them... but to each their own... I'll see if I can get them all for you.

[David Spivak-Focus Magazine]

[David Luttmann]

Can't wait to get my hands on this issue. Nice work David!

[David Spivak-Focus Magazine]

I will be announcing in the coming days more information about this contest that you see printed in the above images.

[David Spivak-Focus Magazine]

Issue #18 is pretty much done printing. One last sig to go on Tuesday. Headed to the bindery later in the week and we should be done early next week. From there, the distributor will pick it up and send out all subscription copies. Dependent upon the speed of the bindery and the distributor, all subscription copies should be mailed out by the 28th or the 4th at the very latest. If you received a copy of Issue #17 - you will receive a copy of Issue #18. We're looking at early December as a target date for the next issue's distribution.

[David Spivak-Focus Magazine]

what I don't understand is this

So thousands of people paid good money to subscribe to his magazine, many others pay good money to be published in his magazine, he sells his magazine in book stores and brags on this forum about how well it sells there compared with other mags. Then he also sells ads for his magazine.

All of this is correct, so far.

So how exactly did the bear market in US Stocks hurt his magazine? In any business slowdown you would want to ramp up marketing efforts which would mean placing more ads not less.

Specifically, it was not just stocks. As I mentioned, galleries with existing contracts with FOCUS feared they were going to be unable to pay for their next ad, the market for photographers to advertise had nearly dried up as well. Around last Autumn, there was so much fear prevailing in the economy that no one was able to do anything and if they could, they weren't sure how to pay for it.

Even if we did pay for the printing and distribution of the next issue, which wasn't a problem, we were unsure how much longer the problem with the economy was going to last. Would it be a few months? A year? Two years? Longer?

How much longer would we need to dip into our savings account for to pay for the printing and distribution of an issue? How much would we need to cut down our overall controlled circulation that directly reaches collectors which would decrease the value of the magazine overall? These were questions we did not have answers to.

We print and distribute magazines for one full year, losing tens of thousands of dollars on each issue. How long does this go for? How much money do we lose? Do we reach a point where we can longer fund the continued printing of the magazine? Again, all of these are unknowns.

If I owned a gallery and my sales were down why would I not want to do everything I could to drive more sales my way. I would also take a serious look at what my marketing efforts had done for me in the past, and pull the plug on wasted efforts. If ad revenues are down that can only mean that they found little to no value in running ads in said magazine.

Because most galleries do not increase their overall sales by anything meaningful by advertising in a magazine. If you're a new gallery, or you have a MAJOR exhibition coming up, then yes, but ARTFORUM doesn't have hundreds of galleries advertising in every issue because they think they're going to increase sales. The purpose for advertising an exhibition inside of a magazine is to increase AWARENESS of the gallery. People in the art world have to be "in the know" about the latest exhibitions, the up and coming hottest artists (photographers) and they get this information from magazines and galleries, at most times, like to make themselves be known and be made aware of. It was not until after AIPAD that we had any idea if this 40-something year old trend was going to continue. Galleries had no idea, either, which is why many held off on advertising.

If collectors aren't buying from reputable and established galleries, they sure aren't going to buy from unknown photographers.

All of this began changing after the AIPAD Show. So around April or so, we began putting the work in for the upcoming issue, #18. 4 months later, a beautiful issue is completely sold out of advertising and will be on newsstands in a week or so and we are hard at work on the next issue and have already received amazing interest in the next issue. Things are so good right now, we may publish two additional issues next year to go to 6x per year -- this is completely dependent on the amount of advertising we generate and how well we sell on newsstands. In addition - we have a new competitor, COLOR Magazine, B&W Magazine's sister publican, that we must be aware of. So many factors go into not only publishing one issue of FOCUS, but publishing an entire year's worth of issues.

] One also has to wonder why when you have paid subscribers, book store sales, and paid submissions from photographers, why you even need to worry about any outside ads and you are so dependent on them that if they dry up your magazine can't even be published. Brooks Jensen at Lenswork runs no ads at all, does not charge photogs to be published, and yet somehow he manages to put out a high quality magazine every other month just on paid subscribers.

First I will state and have stated that I am a huge fan of LW - and of Brooks Jensen. LW is most definitely a high quality publication. Your question is sort of its own answer.

If they just print enough magazines to go to their subscribers, which presumably is around 10,000, then they print close to 1/4 less than we do. In addition, the size of LW is so small you can fit 16 reproductions per side of paper rather than 8 as you see above. Meaning a 96-page magazine for BJ is only 3 signatures, while for FOCUS a 96-page magazine is double that because of our size (9 x 10.875). Additionally, LW is only printed on duotone, 2/2, while FOCUS is CMYK + duotone, 5/5 and in some instances 6/6. Our costs to print one issue of FOCUS Magazine are much, much higher than it is to print probably a year's worth of LW. Because Focus Magazine weighs about 1.5 lbs, it also cannot be shipped the same method that LW is shipped, so our shipping expenses are dramatically higher than LW's.

Finally, we have to, absolutely have to, keep the magazine on newsstands -- it is a huge source of income for us that we have been without and will continue to be without until October. So we need newsstand copies to survive. We have to ship magazines to the newsstand - and that's close to $10,000 all by itself.

In the end, to produce, print, ship and distribute a copy of FOCUS takes close to $100,000. This is why we MUST have advertising and why we rely so much upon it.

[Dave Wooten]

Thanks Dave,

and I appreciate the e mail updates you have been sending to subscribers....