In 1986 I launched a motorcycle magazine in the UK. Back then, a plausible line in chatter would persuade a distributor to get a magazine into the shops without any kind of promotional budget and if you were really clever the printer wouldn’t even demand the money up front. These days, more money is spent on promotion than on printing a new magazine... and it was a time when desktop publishing was just coherent enough to make production of a basic magazine plausible, without any need to go near expensive typesetters.
As well as having no publishing experience I had almost no writing experience – save for the odd article published in Motorcycle Sport and Engineering Today - and only a minimal grasp of the English language (readers were often kind enough to write in pointing out repeated instances of the same mistake – and I did mostly learn from experience). The only thing I had going for me was a love of motorcycles and a hard gained knowledge of used bikes, which along with a lot of help from friends and mechanics, made for the basis of the first couple of issues. The plan, which largely worked, was to get the readers, in future issues, to write about their biking experiences. And, just to emphasize the different ethos of the magazine, there would be no advertising.
The Used Motorcycle Guide came out as a quarterly, which neatly solved any cashflow problems as the money from the first issue paid off the printing costs and financed the second issue. A5 in size, black and white throughout save for some spot colour on the cover and inner pages – 80 pages packed out with info and hardly any photos, for 99 pence when the glossy Bike magazine sold for a quid.
The second year it turned bimonthly with double the initial print run (with a full colour cover but cheaper paper inside), which was about as good as it got – selling 30,000 plus copies an issue. Even when the print run went as high as 60,000 copies, the magazine didn’t really sell any more copies.
That kind of sales, back then, put it ahead of some of the glossy magazines, peaking as the fourth best selling magazine in the UK (then only eight or nine magazines). That level of success meant it didn’t take long for some companies to copy the idea and launch their own versions, usually hilarious because of all the mistakes contained in their adaptation of the buyer’s guide. The UMG even inspired a couple of car magazines, though they didn’t last long!
Other people reckoned they could do even better with glossy, full-sized magazines whilst the established magazines redesigned and reinvented themselves with much denser copy – gone were the huge swathes of artistic white space. Most of the new magazines went bust with the major exception of EMAP’s titles which more or less totally dominated the market.
I ran the UMG rather like I did my motorcycles, in total neglect mode, taking a particular delight in turning up at the distributors looking like I didn’t have two pennies to rub together even when it was making serious money; they mostly took pity on me and didn’t demand the excessive loot that was normally required to keep the print run of a magazine going strongly – the glossies spent huge sums on promotion to keep themselves on the shelves of the major newsagents.
Over the years, a graceful decline in circulation was largely compensated by increasing the cover price and cutting out various bits of the production cycle as desktop publishing programs improved. The real killer was when major newsagents decided, in their infinite wisdom, to compare, not the circulations of similar publications, but how much money they generated in a given period. By then, the glossies cost twice as much as the UMG, which rather than coming out monthly appeared six to ten times a year depending on how energetic I felt. And there were more than twenty magazines on the shelves.
This wasn’t amateur hour any more... the only way out was to go glossy, increase the price and come out every month, as well as bung the distributor a huge promotional budget. By then, the magazine market was mostly superbike orientated, an area I had hardly any interest in and I had little faith that throwing huge quantities of money at the UMG would transform its fortunes. I was actually so far out of things – spending most of the year in Thailand didn’t help – that almost every motorcycle magazine I liked actually went bust!
Even with a fast tumbling circulation, the relatively low print cost, cover price increases and almost zero overheads meant that the magazine was still profitable, albeit at a much lower level than in the past... bear in mind, with a portable computer I needed no fixed abode and could throw it together from some far flung corner of the world when the boredom got to me. The freedom more important than the money.
This benign neglect came to an end in 2000, when the profit seemed to be ready to do a disappearing act – an increase in print costs, for instance, would’ve been nasty. It takes up to four months to get a clear picture of the sales of a magazine, so there’s a certain art to exiting the scene before it goes bad! If you launch a monthly magazine it can take three months to find out how you are doing – meaning you’ve coughed up for another two or three print runs.
Having published and edited the magazine for fourteen years, I was ready to close it down and do a disappearing act but it was obviously more amusing to sell it as a going concern – for once, the enormous cost of setting up a new magazine working for me, as there was some value in the UMG as a going concern. An advert was placed in the magazine and on the website, in which I emphasized that it had been run into the ground in the same way I rode my bikes!
Anyway, what was later described as a frighteningly large sum was quickly thrust into my hands by a rather outsized chap with a beard (who demanded to remain anonymous) who turned the magazine monthly, added a lot of pages and improved the look of the rag – he lasted two years before bailing out (or selling on at a profit, for all I know) and as of July 2002 it was published by Morton’s Motorcycle Media, who had the major of advantage of being able to cross advertise in their other motorcycle magazines. The magazine was finally closed down in May 2003 but the website lives on!
I kept the website (www.net-motorcycles.com), which basically contains all the articles from fourteen year’s worth of the magazine up to the end of 1999 plus lots of new stuff and caries on in the spirit of the original rag – almost zero overhead, written by its readers and just a place for people who love biking to hang out with minimal hassle (no registration, free access, etc.).
In almost every issue of the magazine, I wrote a column called Loose Lines – ranging from the antics of motorcycle dealers to lounging around in Thailand, it usually managed to include something about, er, motorcycles. The column was inspired by Mark Williams’ Running Out of Road, who created Bike magazine – a marvellous read when I grabbed hold of the second issue when I was a bike-mad fourteen year-old – who seems to suffer from a similar boredom problem to myself, ending up in both American and British prisons on various charges.
I have so far managed to avoid that end, though no doubt the large number of people I pissed off in the UK would be only too happy to see that fate befall me – live in hope, children!
Bill Fowler
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