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Putting Together A Magazine With Love

Do people think it’s impossible to create a well-made publication without some sort of trendy Dalston studio or Daddy’s millions?

Posted 24th September 2009, 7:12pm in Features, by Gareth Main, Bearded Magazine
Putting Together A Magazine With Love When it finally made it to the major newsstands of WH Smith and Borders in January this year, it had been almost two years to the day since Bearded began. In amongst the praise and new found fans, the very few less-than-positive comments we received from various areas of the interweb illustrated the warped perception of putting together a magazine with the love and affection to actually make it look, feel and smell like a quality product.

We were called pretentious and Nathan Barley esque by fans of The Word, which made me think more of peoples’ perception of magazines. Do people think it’s impossible to create a well-made publication without some sort of trendy Dalston studio or Daddy’s millions? As Plan B’s Kicking_K remarked to me after the mag’s untimely demise earlier this term, people don’t realise on just how little you can make something that looks expensive. And much like DIY records, there’s as massive element of do-it-yourself about making a magazine like Bearded work.

Firstly, a little history: I came up with the idea of Bearded on a wet golf course in Wrexham. I don’t play golf – I abhor golf – but I was editing an international golf trade magazine in Birmingham and that involved trips to Wrexham to talk faux-enthusiastically about ball dispensers and fertilisers. The number of puns and jokes about emptying your balls into a ball dispenser ran out rapidly, so I needed to do something I wanted to do.

I left unceremoniously with no savings, no money, nadda, in February 2007. Since then, I have held down no less than six full time jobs and spent 11 months on crutches whilst doing Bearded and lots of poorly paid freelance work. I’m still doing them now – I’m writing this piece in a dingy office in Harrow, flicking onto my email pretending to work whenever my boss flicks a watchful eye over at me.

‘Doing Bearded’ for the first two and a half years involved being publisher, editor, reviews editor, live editor, news editor, online editor and, of course, the wonderfully inept ads salesman and money hunter. That means trying to finance the mag, selling ads and writing a lot of the content. Thankfully, our next issue will be the first where I’ve had people in to do the reviews sections for me, and someone else is selling the ads (email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) if interested… please!). Still though, some things remain the same – nobody’s getting paid (even in ad sales) and we’re all in it for the love. Oh, and we’ll still make no money, hopefully enough to pay for the printers though.

DIY is running through everything Bearded does. The whole point of starting Bearded in the first place was to help smaller independent labels and artists. The romanticism behind putting together a load of 7” records that nobody will here in a bedroom hasn’t waned on me despite the changes we’ve seen in the industry over the past decade. Although the vinyl is now CD-Rs, the spirit has expanded. A semi-successful indie label like Big Scary Monsters is the pinnacle of the DIY spirit and that runs down to operations such as Bumtapes, who seem barely able to get their releases out of the door. I fell in love with one Bumtapes artist – Ratface – when a mate of mine (and fellow DIY enthusiast) Andy Price (whose band Dig For Fire also put out their stuff on self-released CD-Rs) showed me an EP he’d bought at a gig he played with Ratface. It was a CD-R wedged between two stapled together pieces of cardboard with a spray painted cover. It’s my pride and joy, well it will be once I’ve stolen it off Andy.

And I’m a huge fan and collector of fanzines. I’m even working on starting my own on library music just because whenever somebody sends me one – and I get lots – I get that twang of affection that this is how a magazine should be put together. Bearded aims to have the look and feel of a deluxe ‘zine, there is no editorial direction – the writers write about what they want to write about, which accounts for the varying writing styles - there is no style guide, no real commissioning aside from ‘this is who’s around for interviews’ and as little editing as possible to make the articles barely readable.

Apart from the insecurity and writing of the multiple financial planning spreadsheets that pretty much go tits up as soon as you’ve written them, there are few downsides to being a DIY music magazine. On the upside you have nobody to answer to except your readers, you can lead with whatever bands and stories you like and you can do anything you want with the print and design. When visiting publishing houses of ‘proper’ publishers, you soon realise that the freedoms of independence are precious in this business, and being able to go down your own route – even when making it work financially is the last thing you consider – is the biggest freedom you can grant yourself.

For us, that’s sort of worked (aside from me being sat in an office in Harrow). All our financial resources go into the print and distribution, which makes it more bewildering that ‘proper’ shops have been arsed to put us on the newsstand - we even had a little box in Borders. When the money runs out (which it frequently does), we stop putting out mags and move online until we’ve raised enough money to put out another. It’s a very bizarre production schedule but that’s what happens when we have no money behind us, no money coming in, nobody experienced at selling ads selling them and no business acumen. We wouldn’t mind a sugar daddy (in fact I’d happily not work for another company as long as I live), but would need someone who doesn’t want any guarantee of getting that money back...

In fact, that would be the dream… to be Nathan Barley.

Bearded Magazine Official Site
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