Mr. Magazine

A Mr. Magazine™ Launch Story…

“We think people are going to want to keep these as sort of a record of the sport. A history of the sport and who were the biggest athletes and what were the best storylines of any given year. That’s why we went high on the price…” Braden Keith, on the high cover price of the magazine.

A magazine for those folks who can’t get enough of chlorine and the excitement of the swimmer’s life; SwimSwam grew from a very popular website into a beautifully-done, very high-quality large format magazine. Its paper is thick and lush and its contents filled to capacity with everything about the sport of swimming that could possibly interest an enthusiast. In fact, Mr. Magazine™ was so impressed with the new launch that I selected it as one of the 30 Hottest New Launches of the year.

Editor in chief Braden Keith and one of his partners, Olympic Gold Medalist Swimmer, Mel Stewart and his wife Tiffany, came together with two other very interested parties to found this amazing read. And I for one am awfully glad they did.

I spoke with Braden recently and we talked about the ins and outs of bringing a magazine such as this one to life, especially after four years on the web. Braden said it had been a learning process for him and his partners, and it continued to teach them every day more and more about the magazine industry. He reflected on a few of the challenges they had faced and those pleasant moments that made it all worthwhile. And he talked about the passion they all had about the brand, which convinced them they could contribute something valuable and collectible in the niche market.

So, grab your goggles and your love for a day at the pool and join the conversation – the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Braden Keith, editor in chief, SwimSwam magazine.

But first the sound-bites:

On what made him decided they needed a print component to go along with the website: We launched the website in 2012. I’d had a previous website and Mel Stewart, one of my partners, who is an Olympic gold medalist in swimming, was looking to start something and we saw that our visions aligned. And the baby of that came out to be SwimSwam.com and we were like most people, we thought print was dead. Why would you print a magazine when you could have real time stuff up on the web forever. Fast forward four years later and all of the magazines were still around, and what we were hearing from all of our advertisers was that our competitors were getting a certain percentage of their money because they had a print magazine and people liked it. And so we decided that we’d give it a try and we thought that we could do it better than what was already in the market.

On the reaction to the print magazine from the swimming community: Some people were definitely skeptical and we had a lot who said the exact thing we’d thought earlier: why print? But I think that once people got the magazine and they held it, this is something that’s been very important to us; we wanted a magazine with thick pages and a thick cover that felt almost like a book more than a magazine. And people just loved it.

On whether the rather high cover price is a reflection of their belief that the magazine is more like a collector’s edition: I think that’s exactly what it is. We think people are going to want to keep these as sort of a record of the sport. A history of the sport and who were the biggest athletes and what were the best storylines of any given year. That’s why we went high on the price.

On any challenges he had to face while creating the print magazine: Definitely there have been challenges. When you’re producing content for a magazine, it all has to be good; it all has to be right. The copyediting; you need an extra layer of copyediting. We haven’t struggled with what to produce, but the actual production process has been a whole different thing.

On the most pleasant moment for him on this magazine journey: We set up a table at the Olympic trials in June this year in Omaha in a local restaurant near the pool and had magazines there for sale. We had a lot of people come up and buy the magazine there, but we had more people who were already subscribers to come up and tell us what a great magazine it was and how much they loved it.

On his future expectations for the magazine: We’d like to go to more than four issues per year, but we have to ramp up our subscribers so that we can afford it. That’s really something that we’d like to do. But we’re always going to be nervous. You hear what people say about magazines. For example, one of my favorite magazines, Mental Floss, just announced that they’re no longer going to be printing their magazine.

On his own personal background: I was a high school swimmer and played water polo in college. I coached swimming throughout college as a summer job, because it beat lifeguarding or checking out groceries at a grocery store. Then I kept getting sucked back into coaching and now I coach high school swimming, but that’s not my primary job; I work for a pipeline company in downtown Houston doing business analysis stuff.

On how he met and got into a partnership with Olympic gold medalist swimmer, Mel Stewart: I was doing my other website and there is a guy named Garrett McCaffrey, and he’s also a partner in the website, but he’s no longer a participating partner. He was sort of the godfather of swimming on the Internet, and had a site called Floswimming back in the day, and he had been aware of what else I was doing on the Internet on my other site. He and Mel had hooked up to start this new site and they wanted to do everything video-based. And Garrett told Mel that he needed to check out my site. Mel is an Olympic gold medalist and gets an automatic credibility and I was not a notable swimmer. But Garret told him that I had built an audience out of basically nothing and that they needed to talk to me about working with them.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up unexpectedly at his home one evening: I will be on my computer and I’ll probably have the TV on sports, and I will be in front of my computer either writing or just compulsively refreshing social media.

On what keeps him up at night: Conflict, just interpersonal conflict. And in this industry there is always conflict. Somebody doesn’t like what you wrote, and I’ll just go over it and over it again in my head and that’s the toughest thing I deal with and what keeps me up at night.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Braden Keith, editor in chief, SwimSwam magazine.

Samir Husni: Congratulations on being named one of the “30 Hottest New Launches” of the year; a job well done. I know SwimSwam started as a website and then you launched the magazine; can you take me through the history of the launch? What made you decide that you needed a print publication to go along with the website?

Braden Keith: We launched the website in 2012. I’d had a previous website and Mel Stewart, one of my partners, who is an Olympic gold medalist in swimming, was looking to start something and we saw that our visions aligned. And the baby of that came out to be SwimSwam.com and we were like most people, we thought print was dead. Why would you print a magazine when you could have real time stuff up on the web forever. And all of our competitors had magazines; we sort of didn’t get it. We thought the magazines would go away before we were ready to launch one.

Fast forward four years later and all of the magazines were still around, and what we were hearing from all of our advertisers was that our competitors were getting a certain percentage of their money because they had a print magazine and people liked it. And so we decided that we’d give it a try and we thought that we could do it better than what was already in the market. We thought that we could make it look and feel better; that we could capture a way to do a magazine that wasn’t a news-based magazine. We didn’t want to put out a magazine about things that had already happened and was old news that people had already read about on the Internet.

So, we just gave it a shot and we’re learning as we go, but as always we’re focusing on the content, content, content and trying to make it look good.

Samir Husni: What has been the reaction from the swimming community? Once you came up with that first issue, and after you’d been online for almost four years, what were people saying about the print edition?

Braden Keith: Some people were definitely skeptical and we had a lot who said the exact thing we’d thought earlier: why print? But I think that once people got the magazine and they held it, this is something that’s been very important to us; we wanted a magazine with thick pages and a thick cover that felt almost like a book more than a magazine. And people just loved it. We were 50/50 when we launched and we weren’t sure what the reaction would be, but people have really liked just the feel of it and the images have been a big piece of it, there are big, powerful images. Ad I think that’s worked really well for us.

Samir Husni: It’s not a cheap magazine, neither the subscription nor the single copy price; it’s almost $15 per issue. Is the cover price a reflection of the content or the belief that you feel like every issue of this magazine is more like a coffee table book or a collector’s edition?

Braden Keith: I think that’s exactly what it is. We think people are going to want to keep these as sort of a record of the sport. A history of the sport and who were the biggest athletes and what were the best storylines of any given year. That’s why we went high on the price. Obviously, the subscription is a pretty good discount from the cover price. I’m sure you’re aware that magazines on newsstands are not a very good economic model unless you’re a big producer.

Samir Husni: And were there any challenges that you had to overcome while doing it?

Braden Keith: Definitely there have been challenges. When you’re producing content for a magazine, it all has to be good; it all has to be right. The copyediting; you need an extra layer of copyediting. We haven’t struggled with what to produce, but the actual production process has been a whole different thing. Dealing with deadlines; we have deadlines on the web, but it’s more or less you get it done as quickly as you can, but when it comes to a magazine there’s a print deadline and things have to all be copyedited and there’s an entire process.

On the web, you write something, throw a picture on it and you copyedit it real quick and you put it up. With magazines, it’s a bit more complex. Between the deadlines and the design process that you have to go through, it’s very different. Information in the articles can change between when it was written and when it actually goes to print.

Those are some of the things that have caused us stress, but at the end of the day when we looked around at the market, there are two other big swimming magazines in the U.S., and we just thought we could do it better and were lucky enough to have found a good printing partner who happens to be a swim geek, as we like to call people who are big in the swimming world. And so he’s been really instrumental in helping us learn about the magazine industry and how to do this.

I wouldn’t say that it’s been as hard as we thought it would be, but then again we’re not perfect yet either. I think we’re still learning where some of these challenges are coming in. A big challenge that we got hit with, and I’m sure a lot of people did; our subscriber’s sign up for auto-renew and everybody received a new credit card with a chip in it this year and we lost probably half of our subscribers in a weekend from getting new credit cards. So, we’re learning about a lot of these things as we go, and I think we’re not far enough in to have learned all of the challenges yet, but we’ve had good people help us out.

Samir Husni: What has been the most pleasant moment for you throughout this magazine journey?

Braden Keith: We set up a table at the Olympic trials in June this year in Omaha in a local restaurant near the pool and had magazines there for sale. We had a lot of people come up and buy the magazine there, but we had more people who were already subscribers to come up and tell us what a great magazine it was and how much they loved it. And it felt really cool to have that fact-to-face interaction with our audience. Once again on the web, you don’t get a lot of interpersonal interactions with your audience, but it was a lot of fun to meet people face-to-face.

Samir Husni: If you and I were talking one year from now, what would you hope to tell me about the magazine? What are your future expectations?

Braden Keith: We’d like to go to more than four issues per year, but we have to ramp up our subscribers so that we can afford it. That’s really something that we’d like to do. But we’re always going to be nervous. You hear what people say about magazines. For example, one of my favorite magazines, Mental Floss, just announced that they’re no longer going to be printing their magazine. And I think it’s the greatest magazine that’s ever been made and if they can’t make it; it just makes me nervous. So, I hope that we’ll still be doing it in a year. I hope that people keep subscribing and the economics of it still makes sense, but I’ll still be very nervous about it.

Samir Husni: What’s your background? Are you a journalist or a swimmer? Or a swimmer turned journalist? What’s the story of Braden Keith?

Braden Keith: I was a high school swimmer and played water polo in college. I coached swimming throughout college as a summer job, because it beat lifeguarding or checking out groceries at a grocery store. Then I kept getting sucked back into coaching and now I coach high school swimming, but that’s not my primary job; I work for a pipeline company in downtown Houston doing business analysis stuff. I worked for the Texas A&M student paper for about three months when I was in college, but that’s the extent of my journalism training. I didn’t like it. They didn’t write things interestingly; they were really focused on this AP kind of, no analysis, no adjectives, style of writing and it just bored me and I hated it.

And that was always in the back of my mind, but the reason I go into this; I actually started more on the programming side and that drew me into it. I needed some tools for my coaching. I needed to build tools for calculating relays and things like that. Then people started using them and I wondered what I could do to get more people reading them, and make a little bit of money off of it at the same time. So, I just started writing stuff and it took off. I don’t really know what the catch was or why it worked, but I just happened to back into it accidentally.

Samir Husni: How did you meet Mel Stewart and get into this partnership with him?

Braden Keith: I was doing my other website and there is a guy named Garrett McCaffrey, and he’s also a partner in the website, but he’s no longer a participating partner. He was sort of the godfather of swimming on the Internet, and had a site called Floswimming back in the day, and he had been aware of what else I was doing on the Internet on my other site.

He and Mel had hooked up to start this new site and they wanted to do everything video-based. And Garrett told Mel that he needed to check out my site. Mel is an Olympic gold medalist and gets an automatic credibility and I was not a notable swimmer. But Garret told him that I had built an audience out of basically nothing and that they needed to talk to me about working with them. Mel was doing a clinic and he called me up and invited me out to dinner. We talked about it and discussed the money and advertisers he already had signed up and I told him that was more money than I had made in two years doing it, so consider me in. And away we went.

Samir Husni: On the current issue you have four co-founders; are you all from Texas?

Braden Keith: No, three of us happen to live here, but none of us are actually from here. We have one Canadian and the non-participating co-founder lives in Phoenix. We’re spread out all over the place.

Samir Husni: But the offices are in Austin?

Braden Keith: Yes, but it’s Mel and Tiffany Stewart, who are husband and wife that are there. We avoid having any kind of a formal office, which is an intentional decision. But technically our headquarters are in Austin. I’m in Houston.

Samir Husni: If I showed up at your home one evening unexpectedly, what would I find you doing; reading a magazine; reading your iPad; watching television; or something else?

Braden Keith: I will be on my computer and I’ll probably have the TV on sports, and I will be in front of my computer either writing or just compulsively refreshing social media.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Braden Keith: Conflict, just interpersonal conflict. And in this industry there is always conflict. Somebody doesn’t like what you wrote, and I’ll just go over it and over it again in my head and that’s the toughest thing I deal with and what keeps me up at night.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

A Mr. Magazine™ Launch Story

“Our demographic, our gamers that grew up in the dawn of the videogame age, the late ‘70s and early to mid ‘80s, through the crash and into the ‘90s; these people all grew up with videogame magazines. And to this day, and our sales show that we’re selling quite a few more print than we are digital, these people still enjoy that tangible product. And to that end we try to make a magazine that’s a little collectible. We have different artwork on the covers and different artists. We use a real high-grade paper inside and on the cover, not many ads; and it’s just a real high-quality magazine.” Mike Kennedy

After being successfully crowd-funded through a double shot of Kickstarter, RETRO Videogame Magazine is into its 11th issue, with its gaming eye on the future. And while founder and president, Mike Kennedy will tell you in a heartbeat that it hasn’t been, nor is it now, a stroll through the proverbial Rose Garden, it is something that he has a passionate commitment to and a project that stirs his entrepreneurial spirit like nothing else could.

I spoke with Mike recently and we talked about the magazine, past, present and future; taking note of each step of the process along the way. It has been a bit of a harrowing journey for Mike and his wife, Tricia, who is co-publisher of the magazine, but it’s also been a learning experience and an exciting joy, such as when they saw Issue 7 in Barnes & Noble for the very first time. It was quite the proud moment for them both.

Mike is a man who is learning as he goes when it comes to the world of magazines, but he has no intention of quitting school. He wants to take RETRO as far as possible and turn it into a gaming brand that people can turn to for that vintage gaming experience that a tangible print product can provide. And it would appear that he’s doing that, with his team of some of the best writers, editors and artists that the industry offers. And with his RETRO store and his website, gamegavel.com, Mike is on his way to becoming a competitive brand indeed in the world of retro gaming.

So, I hope that you enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with a man who has a gamer’s heart with an entrepreneur’s dream inside of it, Mike Kennedy, Founder and President, RETRO Videogame Magazine.

But first the sound-bites:

On the genesis of RETRO magazine: I never thought that I’d be a magazine publisher. In 2008, I started a video-gaming auction site called “GameGavel.com” and it was basically a gaming-dedicated auction site, very similar to what eBay does, but just dedicated to games and other things that geeks, nerds and gamers like. That was my first entrepreneurial venture that I was involved in. I started that for around $800, I think. And I’ve grown that site over the years.

On his most pleasant moment during this magazine experience: But the first milestone, as you indicated, was just getting that first issue in my hands after three or four months of work and a month of doing the Kickstarter; seeing that issue come in was a huge high. It was just amazing. Not only for me, but for my writers, who never probably in their careers, other than a couple of them who have been in the magazine business for a long time, a lot of the younger writers probably never thought they’d see their story in a magazine. So, it was cool for the entire team to be involved with that.

On the biggest stumbling block for him and how he plans to overcome it: Costs right now are our major stumbling block. It costs me somewhere around $14,000 to produce an issue. Not counting the printing. That $14,000 is what my content costs; my layout costs; artwork, editorial and my editors. And that’s not a ton of money. I don’t know in the magazine world if that’s high-end for creating a single issue or low-end.

On what he hopes to be saying about RETRO one year from now: I hope to be telling you that we’re hugely successful and we’ve been managing to get our issues out on time; we’re growing our readership and have expanded into more newsstands, which is something that I’m going to be doing, hopefully, very shortly with Curtis Circulation, maybe with Issue 13. I hope that’s what I’m telling you. (Laughs)

On anything else he’s like to add: Just that we appreciate all of the readers, obviously. We hope that we’re giving them a product that they’ll continue to read and to love, and want to continue to collect. My writing team, again, is the best in the business as far as I’m concerned. If we were better funded, we’d certainly be able to get these issues out on a regular basis; they’d all operate within the time frames and the deadlines and the schedules without fail. But everything is great; it’s just the constant kind of funding battle, which is something that every entrepreneur faces, certainly in the early stages like this.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up unexpectedly one evening at his home: I probably work until somewhere between 7:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. If I’m doing stuff during the day for the magazine, then I have to make up for my real job in the evening or on the weekends. When you work out of your house you kind of are always working. My wife kind of goes crazy with it, but again, generally, you’re kind of always working. When you work out of your home and your home is your office, there’s always as excuse to go and sit down at the desk, pull up your financials and see what you can do. You’re always thinking about business, at least I am. Unfortunately, since I started all my videogame adventures; one of the things I do the least anymore is play videogames.

On what keeps him up at night: The magazine; 100 percent. Sometimes it’s just hard to sleep because I’m always trying to figure out that next move. And when you’re trying to survive, which is kind of the mode that I’m in, you’re constantly thinking about what you’re going to do tomorrow to make sure that another issue will be coming out? Again, it’s just a lot of biz-development type thoughts.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Mike Kennedy, Founder & President, RETRO Videogame Magazine.

Samir Husni: Tell me the story of RETRO.

Mike Kennedy: I never thought that I’d be a magazine publisher. In 2008, I started a video-gaming auction site called “GameGavel.com” and it was basically a gaming-dedicated auction site, very similar to what eBay does, but just dedicated to games and other things that geeks, nerds and gamers like. That was my first entrepreneurial venture that I was involved in. I started that for around $800, I think. And I’ve grown that site over the years.

About three or four years into running the auction marketplace, I got the idea of adding content to it. This whole idea of content and commerce combined was really interesting to me. What I wanted to do was give gamers the ability to go online and read about all of these retro and older games. And also give them the opportunity after reading about them to go buy them or sell them. And then embedding those buy/sell links into the content. So, the content all started as an online website; it integrated with the auction site.

After a few years of doing that, I became part of a podcast. And I had a listener who reached out to me and happened to be in the marketing/magazine side of things and he had the ability to do the entire layout and design and the creative work involved with a magazine. And he reached out to me and asked had I ever thought about doing a magazine? And I told him, obviously no. And he told me he would love to work with me on it and help me create it. Me being in the gaming world through the auction site and my podcast, I had quite a few contacts with journalists and writers and things like that.

So, it wasn’t a big switch to go from online to print, as far as attaining the content. It was kind of the same process. We had all of the building blocks in place, but then the question became: why do a magazine in this day and age?

Our demographic, our gamers that grew up in the dawn of the videogame age, the late ‘70s and early to mid ‘80s, through the crash and into the ‘90s; these people all grew up with videogame magazines. And to this day, and our sales show that we’re selling quite a few more print than we are digital, these people still enjoy that tangible product. And to that end we try to make a magazine that’s a little collectible. We have different artwork on the covers and different artists. We use a real high-grade paper inside and on the cover, not many ads; and it’s just a real high-quality magazine.

Anyway, it was a really nice switch. And then we decided that we’d do a Kickstarter for it and this was in the fall of 2013. We did our first Kickstarter and raised around $70,000. We sold about 2,500 subscriptions in a month and that really got the whole ball rolling. From the time our Kickstarter ended, which was in November, 2013; we had our first issue out in January. We’re bimonthly; so we’re supposed to be getting an issue out every other month, six issues per year.

And that’s what happened with the magazine its first year. For the most part, we got our issues out on time; it got a little slow in the summer, but everybody received their issues and then in the fall of 2014, in October, we did our second-year Kickstarter. And we raised another $40,000 to $50,000; sold another 1,400 to 1,500 subscriptions during that second time around.

And that’s pretty much gotten us to where we are today. I ended up having a sort of falling out with my layout/design person and so it’s been a struggle, because when he started he got a little stock in my company and was supposed to get some advertising commissions, but just starting out our ad sales were very insignificant for the most part, so he didn’t get paid a lot for that.

But when he left; when I let him go after Issue 7, suddenly I had to pay a layout/design person to come onboard and that was never budgeted in to the second-year Kickstarter. And like a lot of people who do Kickstarter, many times you underfund it; you don’t know all of the ends and outs. I had never published a magazine before, so finding the right printer, knowing what we should be paying to print; I think we got taken advantage of just a bit for six or seven issues; we were paying a lot for printing. We’ve since lowered the cost on that significantly by finding another vendor for that.

But you learn all of these things as you go, and frequently you don’t load everything into that Kickstarter that you need. Certainly, things like salaries for me were never loaded in. I have another job on the side, a career that I’ve been involved with for almost 30 years. I work out of my house; I’m a regional person, so it’s given me the opportunity to start this passion project on the side. I’ve really never paid myself, it was never budgeted in, but now we’re going on three years and I’d really like to start getting paid. (Laughs)

It’s a great magazine and super high-quality. So, that’s how the magazine started and has evolved. We’re 11 issues in right now and getting ready to finish out our second year, which will be the final issue of the year-two Kickstarter. We got pretty slow; again, underfunded. I’ve borrowed more money from my 401K to get Issue 11 out and now I’m trying to figure out what to do for Issue 12. I’m looking for other opportunities for my writing team to leverage their abilities to write for third parties and things like that. I’m looking for other revenue-generating opportunities to continue to help fund the magazine. And that’s where we’re at today.

Samir Husni: What has been the most pleasant moment for you during this magazine experience? Was it holding that first issue in your hands when it came back from the printer?

Mike Kennedy: There have been a few milestones for me and first of all, I absolutely love this. I want this magazine to continue forever; for people to enjoy it. Certainly, videogame magazines in the U.S. have pretty much died out completely, other than one behemoth magazine that we all know, “Game Informer.”

But the first milestone, as you indicated, was just getting that first issue in my hands after three or four months of work and a month of doing the Kickstarter; seeing that issue come in was a huge high. It was just amazing. Not only for me, but for my writers, who never probably in their careers, other than a couple of them who have been in the magazine business for a long time, a lot of the younger writers probably never thought they’d see their story in a magazine. So, it was cool for the entire team to be involved with that.

And then the second big milestone was finally seeing Issue 7, which was our first issue in Barnes & Noble. That was really great. That was probably the second-best day of this whole thing.

But everything else is just great. The whole creative process is amazing; figuring out what you’re going to feature in every issue; looking for the artists. It’s always a high when you see what your cover art is going to look like. Those are probably the next best days for me and then just working with a talented group of writers, some of them are the best writers in the industry.

When I did the Kickstarter, I surrounded myself with some of the best writers in the industry. Andy Eddy has been a writer; he was editor in chief of VideoGames & Computer Entertainment back in the mid-‘80s. I read his magazine back then and to have him on my team is pretty neat. And again, just to work with some of the best in the industry has been another great thing; so it’s really been a great project. It’s been a great experience. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s certainly very rewarding.

Samir Husni: What is the biggest stumbling block for you and how do you plan to overcome it?

Mike Kennedy: Costs right now are our major stumbling block. It costs me somewhere around $14,000 to produce an issue. Not counting the printing. That $14,000 is what my content costs; my layout costs; artwork, editorial and my editors. And that’s not a ton of money. I don’t know in the magazine world if that’s high-end for creating a single issue or low-end.

We do pay our writers well. I want to be a company that pays writers well. There are so many companies and websites that don’t pay at all; it’s really bad. The problem is you have so many people that; number one, think they’re writers because they can just sit at home and do it. Many of them are not great writers. It comes back to; you get what you pay for, it really does. When I originally started out I wasn’t really paying for writers for content, although I still had very acceptable writers at that time. But when you get into the magazine side, you really can’t low-ball these people. They’re contracting the writing for a lot of outfits and not getting paid a lot from some of them, just trying to get their name out there. So, I want writers that want to write for us because we do pay well.

And we didn’t budget $14,000 an issue times six into the Kickstarter; that was our fault. So, I’ve been trying to manage it, self-funding this to the point where we are today. But we do sell some advertisement, although I don’t have anyone full-time doing that. That’s one of my problems. I don’t really have the time to do it, which I feel terrible about because I think if I could focus on it, I would sell more. But when you have a real job and you do this on the side, there’s that tipping point where you have to decide when do you leave the comfort and safety of your real job and jump into this thing full-time? My problem is I get paid pretty well on my real job and at this point sucking all of that money out of the business wouldn’t make any sense. First of all, there wouldn’t be enough to suck out to support me, but even if there was, I’m sort of able to do it all at this point. It’s just a balancing act.

But the costs are certainly up there and I’m not personally wealthy to just continue to keep on funding this forever. I’m always looking for avenues to generate more revenue. We’re doing some side projects for third parties; we’ve done a couple of those. I’m talking to retailers about doing holiday buyer’s guides. The bottom line is we have a great pool of writers, editors and artists. Some of the best in the industry and they’re all here. It doesn’t seem like too much of a longshot to think that I can use those same people to create other products for other people; publish other products for other people, whether it be digital or print or both.

So, finding writers, keeping good writers, finding artists, none of that has been a problem. There are a lot of people that are good writers and who want to write and love being a part of a tangible magazine. Telling your friends and family to go to the store and pick up your magazine is pretty cool. And it’s just more meaningful than a website or a digital magazine to some extent.

Samir Husni: If you and I were having this same conversation one year from now, what would you hope to be telling me about RETRO?

Mike Kennedy: I hope to be telling you that we’re hugely successful and we’ve been managing to get our issues out on time; we’re growing our readership and have expanded into more newsstands, which is something that I’m going to be doing, hopefully, very shortly with Curtis Circulation, maybe with Issue 13. I hope that’s what I’m telling you. (Laughs)

Samir Husni: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Mike Kennedy: Just that we appreciate all of the readers, obviously. We hope that we’re giving them a product that they’ll continue to read and to love, and want to continue to collect. My writing team, again, is the best in the business as far as I’m concerned. If we were better funded, we’d certainly be able to get these issues out on a regular basis; they’d all operate within the time frames and the deadlines and the schedules without fail.

But everything is great; it’s just the constant kind of funding battle, which is something that every entrepreneur faces, certainly in the early stages like this. But we’re 11 issues in and I think we have a pretty good track record for quality.

Samir Husni: If I showed up one evening unexpectedly to your home, what would I find you doing; reading a magazine; reading your iPad; playing a retro videogame; having a glass of wine; or something different?

Mike Kennedy: I probably work until somewhere between 7:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. If I’m doing stuff during the day for the magazine, then I have to make up for my real job in the evening or on the weekends. When you work out of your house you kind of are always working. My wife kind of goes crazy with it, but again, generally, you’re kind of always working. When you work out of your home and your home is your office, there’s always as excuse to go and sit down at the desk, pull up your financials and see what you can do. You’re always thinking about business, at least I am.

Unfortunately, since I started all my videogame adventures; one of the things I do the least anymore is play videogames. So, you’re probably never going to walk in on me playing a videogame. You may walk in on me watching TV and relaxing with my wife, or in the garage, which is the office, either planning the next issue or trying to figure out how I’m going to pay for the prior issue; just trying to figure out what my next move is, anything to progress this and keep this great thing moving forward is pretty much always on my mind.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Mike Kennedy: The magazine; 100 percent. Sometimes it’s just hard to sleep because I’m always trying to figure out that next move. And when you’re trying to survive, which is kind of the mode that I’m in, you’re constantly thinking about what you’re going to do tomorrow to make sure that another issue will be coming out? Again, it’s just a lot of biz-development type thoughts. LinkedIn has been a tremendous asset. Whether it’s connecting with the writer, or the printers; LinkedIn has just been tremendous. Anybody that’s an entrepreneur and trying to make connections, you can’t go wrong with LinkedIn. It’s really great. And the people are great.

But the magazine keeps me up at night and what I’m going to do to get that next issue out. That’s the first thought, and then getting it out on time is the next thing. But again, it just really all comes down to capital and funding.

Right now, we’re just scratching the surface for this magazine. When we did the Kickstarter, we had subscribers in over 34 countries. So, it has international appeal and it’s selling really well. We were going through Ingram, and we were only in Barnes & Noble and Hastings Entertainment. Well, Hastings just went out of business. So we’ve been selling 30 percent, pretty much on target. We’ve nailed 30 percent sell-through at Barnes & Noble. But Ingram; that’s the only place they had us.

We’re talking to Curtis now and they love the magazine and they’re telling me that we’re going to sell 25 percent of what we stock. And they’re going to research the best stores for us to be in and get us in to a ton of other retailers. I’ve been told that growing your subscriber base really goes back to the newsstand primarily. You’re not going to grow your subscriber base just by being in Barnes & Noble. You have to be everywhere.

And printing costs are pretty cheap these days; I don’t really have any problems with that. Selling 25 percent of what we stock; we can certainly cover our printing costs, and hopefully some of the content cost and then factor in the advertising. It’s all the chicken or the egg; you have to have the circulation to get the advertisers. And you need the advertisers to help fund that circulation, so that’s the battle, I think, that so many people starting out are going to face. It’s really been a big learning experience.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

A Mr. Magazine™ Launch Story

“We had the print background and we believed in that. Also, with everything we were reading and researching, we felt that print is strong. I know it’s taken a pretty bad beating over the past several years, but really in the past two years we’ve seen a great surge in print again. And for us we felt that it’s almost not real until it’s in print. The digital is fantastic and we certainly have full digital; we’re doing a lot with video, and I like to say that we drive it all to our digital. We have a tangible lead behind that people want and we bring it all together with events.” Daniel Hall

Two new print titles have recently hit newsstands: Celebrity Page and Bella L.A. Both are from the creative talents of husband and wife team, Daniel and Courtenay Hall. The Hall’s began their passionate magazine journey with Bella New York, a women’s luxury lifestyle publication offering an insider’s guide to one of the most affluent areas in America. Bella New York spotlights a sophisticated combination of fashion, beauty, health, philanthropy, arts and culture, cuisine, celebrity and entertainment.

Bella L.A. is the latest regional title that will mirror its sister publication, only focusing on L.A. instead of the Big Apple. I spoke with Daniel Hall recently and we talked about his future vision for the Bella Media Group brand and how he and Courtenay hope to keep spinning the North American globe by having Bella’s for many, many cities. Next up: Miami.

The other new title is one that is unique in its desire to cast celebrities in a more positive light: Celebrity Page, named after the syndicated entertainment news program that airs on the cable network, REELZ. The magazine is a monthly that showcases many of the philanthropic efforts that celebrities are interested in. It also presents a more comfortable look at some of our greatest and most popular icons. It’s a breath of fresh air in the celeb world as it shies away from the behind-the-bushes-caught-you negativity many of the gossip-based titles go for. Daniel’s unique strategy for distributing the premiere issue was an exclusive deal with Barnes & Noble, which earned him first-shelf placement in the Entertainment section in all 634 stores as a joint partnership. While it was a most sweet deal, Daniel said for following issues it will not be Barnes & Noble exclusively as they plan on broadening their horizons and newsstands.

Daniel is a print lover from way back, as is his wife, Courtenay. They used their passion and their own money to start Bella New York and have watched it grow and flourish – so much so they started Bella L.A. and Celebrity Page.

So, I hope that you enjoy this very interesting discussion with a man who knows how to use hard work, passion and dedication to make his dream come true – the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Daniel Hall, publisher, Celebrity Page, Bella New York and Bella L.A.

But first the sound-bites:

On why he’s launching print magazines in this digital age: By design, when we came up with the idea for Bella, we knew that we wanted to go to national with a bunch of regionals, if you will. Bella New York was our first magazine, obviously, and it’s been just a little over five years and we’re going onto Bella L.A. and because 50 percent of the content will be of national interest and the other 50 percent of the content is going to be geared toward that region. And we chose that model because we did not want to compete against the nationals; we didn’t want to have our fashion compete against Vogue. So, we said that if we take a little bit of the nationals and put it into a regional and then let that region own it with some local content, we felt like we’d have better success, because through our research we felt niche publications were doing better.

On the idea behind Celebrity Page magazine and its connection to the television program of the same name: Basically, we’ve partnered with the people who actually have Celebrity Page TV. Of course, we’re not partners with them on the television show, just on the print and the digital. We saw an area where we wanted to position celebrities in a positive light. We wanted to show their philanthropic efforts; we didn’t want to come across as a tabloid that was hiding in the bushes and seeing who was coming out of a cellulite clinic or anything like that.

On why he decided to go through Barnes & Noble exclusively for the distribution of the premiere issue of Celebrity Page: We have a great relationship with Barnes & Noble when it comes to Bella. And our sales are fantastic with them, so I approached them and asked if they’d want to partner with us on this launch. According to what they told me, this was the first time they had entered into this type arrangement too. I was able to negotiate first-shelf placement in the Entertainment section in all 634 stores as a joint partnership. And we said that through the TV and through the magazine, we would also promote Barnes & Noble and just try to drive readers and traffic to their retail outlets to help promote the store and really, just help everyone’s cause.

On what he believes the role of print is today: We had the print background and we believed in that. Also, with everything we were reading and researching, we felt that print s strong. I know it’s taken a pretty bad beating over the past several years, but really in the past two years we’ve seen a great surge in print again. And for us we felt that it’s almost not real until it’s in print. The digital is fantastic and we certainly have full digital; we’re doing a lot with video, and I like to say that we drive it all to our digital. We have a tangible leave behind that people want and we bring it all together with events.

On the biggest stumbling block that he had to face during the launch of any of his magazines and how he overcame it: Two things come to mind: the naysayers who kept saying print is dead and we were absolutely crazy to go into a print publication. Had we listened to any of those people we obviously wouldn’t have launched any of our magazines. So, I think overcoming all of the naysayers just as we were starting to do our preliminary research on what we should do and how we should launch. The second thing was the finances of launching. We did not go after investors. My wife and I self-funded. We like to say it was an Amex card and a dream. And literally it was. We sold the first issue on the concept; we printed a media kit and we sold the idea.

On where the next Bella magazine will be after New York and L.A.: As far as our business model, we plan on going to Miami next. And we’re hoping to do that in one year’s time. Miami and then next, and I’m not sure why really, but we felt we wanted to do something in either Dallas or Houston, something along those lines as a fourth market.

On the most pleasant moment he encountered during the launching of the magazines: I graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in 1997 with a B.A.and I had the opportunity to go back and interview the president of the college for the magazine. And it’s those types of things that hit me sometimes and I can’t really believe they’re happening, and interviewing some of these amazing athletes and just having exposure and being able to highlight them. With Bella too, we’re fashion, beauty, wellness; we’re an overall lifestyle, those are just three of the main focuses of the magazine. And even a lot of the wellness content; when you’re highlighting these philanthropic efforts of some of these unfortunate diseases and things some children have; when we support them and we go to these fundraisers and highlight and try to help them create awareness; that is meaningful to us.

On anything else he’d like to add: I’d just like to thank our supporters and thank our team. We’re a small crew that does a lot. And really, everything that we do is to just try and put good content to each of those areas and basically don’t stop. Bella is an example of what passion and dedication can do.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up unexpectedly to his home one evening: We have three small children, not so small now; they’re 12, 11 and 7. Being that we work together, we try when we come home to turn it off. And sometimes that’s difficult, because obviously, you’re always thinking of something. What needs to be done? But we really try to focus and get home and then zone in on what’s important at that point. For the most part it would be being with the children, doing something, whether it’s afterschool soccer, or just being home. It’s really family time that we focus on and we try to really pay attention to doing good quality family time and during the day good quality business.

On what keeps him up at night: I have to say that I am a good sleeper, so when it is bedtime, I can typically shut it down and go to sleep. But when I am kept up it’s just all of the activities of what we’re doing. I don’t want to ever take anything for granted. Life is short for all of us, so at night I try to really think of whether or not we accomplished what we wanted to? I think of strategic ways that we can do better to make a bigger impact on people that is going to be meaningful and to help them. We try and make the content more than just fluff. We try to make a difference with the brand when people are reading the pages of Bella and Celebrity Page.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Daniel Hall, publisher, Celebrity Page, Bella New York and Bella L.A.

Samir Husni: Why are you launching a new print magazine in this digital age? And in fact, with Bella L.A., you’re actually launching two print magazines; tell me a little about your story.

Daniel Hall: By design, when we came up with the idea for Bella, we knew that we wanted to go to national with a bunch of regionals, if you will. Bella New York was our first magazine, obviously, and it’s been just a little over five years and we’re going onto Bella L.A. and because 50 percent of the content will be of national interest and the other 50 percent of the content is going to be geared toward that region.

And we chose that model because we did not want to compete against the nationals; we didn’t want to have our fashion compete against Vogue. So, we said that if we take a little bit of the nationals and put it into a regional and then let that region own it with some local content, we felt like we’d have better success, because through our research we felt niche publications were doing better. And we’re not niche in the sense of a special interest type of publication; we’re still more general interest. We are appealing to the masses.

But we knew by focusing on each region it would allow them to own it and hopefully want to purchase it, and it has been. Thank God it has been going that way. It’s been a real grass roots effort, but it’s certainly been gaining momentum issue after issue, and we felt it was time to launch Bella L.A. now in order to keep that momentum going.

Samir Husni: In addition to Bella, you’ve just launched Celebrity Page. And you’ve launched it in a way that it’s only distributed at Barnes & Noble. Would you tell me about the genesis of the idea behind Celebrity Page, the magazine and its connectivity with the television program?

Daniel Hall: Basically, we’ve partnered with the people who actually have Celebrity Page TV. Of course, we’re not partners with them on the television show, just on the print and the digital. We saw an area where we wanted to position celebrities in a positive light. We wanted to show their philanthropic efforts; we didn’t want to come across as a tabloid that was hiding in the bushes and seeing who was coming out of a cellulite clinic or anything like that.

Being that celebrities are such icons really, if you will, to some of the millennials and to older folks as well and the impact that celebrities have on people’s lives; we felt that by putting a positive spin on it and by putting something new out there, and with the TV component to back it up and the full digital, it would be something good to partner on, and be great to add to the Bella Media Group portfolio as just a positive reinforcement to these celebrities of highlighting and honoring them for what they do in that positive way.

Samir Husni: Why did you decide to go through Barnes & Noble exclusively with the premiere launch of Celebrity Page?

Daniel Hall: We have a great relationship with Barnes & Noble when it comes to Bella. And our sales are fantastic with them, so I approached them and asked if they’d want to partner with us on this launch. According to what they told me, this was the first time they had entered into this type arrangement too. I was able to negotiate first-shelf placement in the Entertainment section in all 634 stores as a joint partnership. And we said that through the TV and through the magazine, we would also promote Barnes & Noble and just try to drive readers and traffic to their retail outlets to help promote the store and really, just help everyone’s cause.

We felt it was a good partnership for us. Barnes & Noble is obviously a great name, and you know better than anyone, as far as newsstands go, that they have certainly been struggling over that past few years, but our stand sales are great and we felt that if we could really promote one place and tell people: hey, go here, get it here, it would be very effective.

We are rolling out with another national distributor after this initial first issue, so it’s not going to be exclusive with Barnes & Noble anymore. We are going to increase with additional stands as well, and that will be through The Publishing Distribution. We’ve signed up with those guys as well. But for the launch we went with Barnes & Noble exclusively and it went great. We’re doing a lot of cross-promotion with them. We’re just trying to get people who shop there to purchase our magazine, obviously, but also any title.

Samir Husni: Someone might wonder what you’d been drinking to publish three print magazines in this digital age. What do you believe the role of print is today?

Daniel Hall: I come from a print background. And so does my wife. My wife Courtenay is the editor in chief of the magazine and I’m the publisher, so it’s a husband and wife combo. We met in college at our first job with an advertising agency. My wife jumped over to publishing first and I followed.

So, we had the print background and we believed in that. Also, with everything we were reading and researching, we felt that print s strong. I know it’s taken a pretty bad beating over the past several years, but really in the past two years we’ve seen a great surge in print again. And for us we felt that it’s almost not real until it’s in print. The digital is fantastic and we certainly have full digital; we’re doing a lot with video, and I like to say that we drive it all to our digital. We have a tangible leave behind that people want and we bring it all together with events.

But what we felt in print was exactly that; the tangible leave behind. The celebrities are very supportive and to give you an example, I think it was in our second issue, we highlighted a health expert. Tragically, she was on her deathbed about two months ago. Her niece called me and asked for copies of that issue of the magazine so that they could pass it around to members of the family.

And that just reconfirmed to us the specialness of print; you just can’t get that with digital. You’re not going to have somebody ask you to go get your digital archive so they can see their cover photo. So, I feel the pass-along with print is invaluable. And it’s just real. You have that print copy and these writers, celebrities and editors that we’re highlighting, they take those copies and they keep them forever. We just feel like that when it’s in print, it’s real. We knew that we couldn’t be solely in print, but we wanted to drive it all with the backbone being print. And adding the multiplatform to our brands as supporting everything, but knowing print is still the strongest; it gives the best return on investment and we felt the pass-along rate, as far as having them displayed in doctor’s offices and salons, that type of thing. And print is the most trackable. With digital it’s craziness with all of the numbers; there were a thousand clicks, but did someone walk through my door and purchase the product?

And the brands can get so crafty with print and people love it. You have that diamond ring jumping off of the glossy whit page, it’s just looks gorgeous. And we’re avid magazine readers. From the beginning we knew that we needed to do a print publication, plus the digital and with Celebrity Page, the TV components.

Samir Husni: What was the biggest stumbling block that faced you in the launch of Bella or Celebrity Page and how did you overcome it?

Daniel Hall: Two things come to mind: the naysayers who kept saying print is dead and we were absolutely crazy to go into a print publication. Had we listened to any of those people we obviously wouldn’t have launched any of our magazines. So, I think overcoming all of the naysayers just as we were starting to do our preliminary research on what we should do and how we should launch.

The second thing was the finances of launching. We did not go after investors. My wife and I self-funded. We like to say it was an Amex card and a dream. And literally it was. We sold the first issue on the concept; we printed a media kit and we sold the idea. We were able to sell enough to print our first edition and from there it just continued to roll. We call it an “attic startup,” we launched out of an attic where we lived and it was really a grass roots effort. It was having enough confidence to overcome the naysayers and then being bold enough to sell it before printing, knowing that we had to deliver. I think having our backs against the wall like that, knowing that those challenges really pushed us and motivated us to prove that print was not dead, it’s still very much alive, and you don’t need a big VC (venture capital) company behind you. You need passion, motivation and hustle, and you really can accomplish things and make your dreams come true.

Samir Husni: I interviewed a gentleman who just started a magazine down in New Orleans recently called Art+Design, and he quoted Tennessee Williams in his letter from the publisher, saying: “The United States has three major cities, New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans. And everywhere else is Cleveland.” So, where is the next Bella after New York and L.A.? Is it going to be New Orleans?

Daniel Hall: (Laughs) That’s a good point and it’s certainly a possibility. As far as our business model, we plan on going to Miami next. And we’re hoping to do that in one year’s time. Miami and then next, and I’m not sure why really, but we felt we wanted to do something in either Dallas or Houston, something along those lines as a fourth market.

Miami would be next. And that’s the beauty of it. The content when we designed Bella and we were putting the departments in place and how we would structure it, we knew that was the direction that we wanted. That with each magazine we could have different covers or we could have one cover across all titles and then still have our “Love in the City” and our “Chow Bella,” which is our food section, geared specifically toward that major market. That’s our idea. So, hopefully, God willing, Miami will be our next market.

Samir Husni: During the process of launching those magazines, what was the most pleasant moment that you encountered?

Daniel Hall: I graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in 1997 with a B.A. and I had the opportunity to go back and interview the president of the college for the magazine. And it’s those types of things that hit me sometimes and I can’t really believe they’re happening, and interviewing some of these amazing athletes and just having exposure and being able to highlight them.

With Bella too, we’re fashion, beauty, wellness; we’re an overall lifestyle, those are just three of the main focuses of the magazine. And even a lot of the wellness content; when you’re highlighting these philanthropic efforts of some of these unfortunate diseases and things some children have; when we support them and we go to these fundraisers and highlight and try to help them create awareness; that is meaningful to us. And that makes it a little bit more real for me that we’re actually making a difference in some of these families’ lives by trying to help. Where some of these magazines never even think of covering a kidney disease or something else, we kind of promote that to really help create awareness and then we go and fully support the event; we back it and do fundraising and that type of thing.

I think a lot of the enjoyment comes from being involved in those types of things and being able to honor those families by just highlighting and helping to create awareness for their situations.

Samir Husni: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?

Daniel Hall: I’d just like to thank our supporters and thank our team. We’re a small crew that does a lot. And really, everything that we do is to just try and put good content to each of those areas and basically don’t stop. Bella is an example of what passion and dedication can do. It’s amazing that we’ve been fortunate enough to be able to get to where we are today, and we plan on keeping going and we truly appreciate everyone involved.

Samir Husni: If I showed up unexpectedly to your home one evening after work, what would I find you doing; reading a magazine, reading on your iPad, watching television, or something else?

Daniel Hall: We have three small children, not so small now; they’re 12, 11 and 7. Being that we work together, we try when we come home to turn it off. And sometimes that’s difficult, because obviously, you’re always thinking of something. What needs to be done? But we really try to focus and get home and then zone in on what’s important at that point. For the most part it would be being with the children, doing something, whether it’s afterschool soccer, or just being home. It’s really family time that we focus on and we try to really pay attention to doing good quality family time and during the day good quality business.

You can catch us doing anything from playing a board game, to sitting and watching a family movie together, and we try to do that. One night is movie night; one night is board game night; sometimes it is just everyone doing their own thing. My wife is a big TV fan, so I may just try and catch something that she has DVR’ed and we’ll watch it together. In the later part of the evening, after the kids have gone to bed, it will be back to work and trying to plan for the next day and week, and back into the thinking process.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Daniel Hall: That’s a good question. (Laughs) I have to say that I am a good sleeper, so when it is bedtime, I can typically shut it down and go to sleep. But when I am kept up it’s just all of the activities of what we’re doing. I don’t want to ever take anything for granted. Life is short for all of us, so at night I try to really think of whether or not we accomplished what we wanted to? I think of strategic ways that we can do better to make a bigger impact on people that is going to be meaningful and to help them. We try and make the content more than just fluff. We try to make a difference with the brand when people are reading the pages of Bella and Celebrity Page.

So, if I am kept awake, it’s from thinking about the day and of new ideas about how we can differentiate and better ourselves.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

“While the Internet shows you what’s out there, it’s not what you always see. There are images that look great on the Internet, but once you see them in person, they’re not that hot. So, I think someone spending $25,000 and up for a painting rarely will buy it sight unseen on the Internet, unless it has provenance that it’s to an artist they have already experienced on some more intimate level in person.

“Taking that idea and putting it back to the magazine; it’s like when people look at an artwork, they want to have a tactile experience, so picking up a magazine and looking at it, feeling the weight of the magazine in your hand, the thickness of the paper, the high visual quality of what’s on the page; it kind of creates a world that you can get sucked into. It captures your attention and your emotions, and you can experience it by holding it in your hand, take it home with you and read it at your leisure. It’s just a completely, I think, more rewarding experience than looking at an online magazine.” Steve Martin

Art+Design magazine is a New Orleans-based publication that is spreading its local wings and going global. Something its founder and publisher, Steve Martin, said has been the ultimate goal all along. The magazine is taking on the luxury market and adding a healthy dash of creative artistry to the mix by viewing each and every topic from an artistic lens, an interesting concept that certainly spices things up and changes the niche game entirely.

I spoke with Steve recently and we talked about his “worldly” expectations for Art+Design and also touched on the local insert that will soon start plumping the book with even more goodness of content, his new magazine called Canvas, an idea that came to him as he thought about some local advertisers who might get left behind with the new global slant of the parent publication.

Steve is an artist and a patron saint of the art districts of New Orleans and Miami, having galleries in both for quite some time. Today, he concentrates on his own studio in the Crescent City and his magazines that promise to bring art, fashion, photography, interiors and many other luxury topics to the four corners of the world, all covered in the creative style he knows so well, the artists’ eye. He is a man who is open about his deep and abiding faith in God and his sheer sincerity shines through each and every expression of his work that he shares.

So, I hope that you enjoy this very informative and interesting discussion with an artist and a creator of print that is both an entrepreneur and an experienced publisher in his own right, the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Steve Martin, Founder and Publisher, Art+Design magazine.

Steve Martin

But first the sound-bites:

On the history of Art+Design: I started thinking about where people were coming from when it came to my own art and it was the luxury market. And I began to think about luxury lifestyle magazines and how when you look at W Magazine, they have an art editorial in there and it really means something, and there’s Architectural Digest that has an art essay in it, and it really just stands out. I came up with the idea of creating a magazine that encompassed art, design and the experience of that luxury lifestyle and that’s where Art+Design came from.

On why he felt that a print magazine was the best platform for Art+Design: It’s like when people look at an artwork, they want to have a tactile experience, so picking up a magazine and looking at it, feeling the weight of the magazine in your hand, the thickness of the paper, the high visual quality of what’s on the page; it kind of creates a world that you can get sucked into. It captures your attention and your emotions, and you can experience it by holding it in your hand, take it home with you and read it at your leisure. It’s just a completely, I think, more rewarding experience than looking at an online magazine.

On why he decided to go global with the magazine: New Orleans has definitely injected into the world a great number of very influential people: writers, artists and musicians. It’s the birthplace of jazz and there’s quite a bit of culture that has permeated the world from New Orleans. I was thought that New Orleans was on the same level as New York and Paris in its cultural impact. And I really thought it should be elevated and there was nothing in New Orleans that elevated New Orleans or made anyone think of anything that they weren’t already thinking, which was that we were provincial. So, when I started this thing out I wanted it to be an international magazine. It was never meant to just stay local. My long-term vision was to launch it into the international public eye as quickly as possible.

On why he thinks it took so long for someone like himself to come along and realize that the city of New Orleans was deserving of a global magazine that documented the luxury lifestyle in an artistic way: It’s a little bit of that provincial nature that everyone saw from outside New Orleans. They weren’t off; it is provincial in a way. It’s a hip little city and a tight community. It’s done a certain way.

On whether he believes that as long as there is art, there will be print: Yes. I think that the demise of print magazines is premature. I don’t think that the Internet can give the experience that a magazine does. Now, will it kill off the weaker magazines; yes, it’s already done that. You’ve seen the decline in the print market and that’s due to the weaning process that’s heightened by the Internet. I don’t think that you get a chance to hang around if you’re not staying alive by figuring out how to stay alive. You have to be proactive in it. You can’t just create it, then let it coast.

On how he is being proactive with Art+Design: We’re assignment driven, so we get submissions all of the time, but that’s never really worked out for us, so it’s really just keeping our eyes opened and looking at world trends. One of the things that I try to do, and is an interesting direction, I think, is that because New Orleans is that international city; we look for stories that are in the world and either have some thread back to New Orleans, and that can be really thin, or from a story that’s already here and has some effect out in the world.

On the biggest stumbling block he’s had to face and how he overcame it: I guess it was the money because I started with none. I didn’t have a backer; it’s self-sustaining, I guess. The way that I created it was I took a notepad and I laid out 80 pages, hand-drawn in the notepad, and then I went into Vanity Fair, Vogue and Architectural Digest and Art News and tore pages out of those magazines and then created an 80-page, stapled together copy of those stripped out pages and I walked around the city and I showed people my notebook of what I wanted to design and what I wanted the layout of the magazine to be and the concept behind it, and then I showed them the ads and the stories that were in the stripped out pages that I had, and I said this is what I’m shooting for, for my magazine to be of this caliber and quality and this level of publication.
And I basically sold enough ads from that to start it, so the difficulty has been every issue for the first four years now has been hand-to-mouth.

On what kind of art he creates: My website is stevemartinfineart.com and I paint, sculpt and draw. I make prints. I’m self-taught, so I haven’t run into anything that I haven’t tried. (Laughs) I’m always experimenting. Again, I came from a little town and I have always been an artist. I won a competition when I was five years old and I got to go on television for an art piece that I did. And that’s when I decided that I wanted to be an artist. I got all that attention and some candy. And I’ve stayed with it.

On anything else he’d like to add: Art+Design is meant to be the global magazine, I want it to be on par with Vanity Fair, Town & Country, Architectural Digest; all of those magazines. That’s been the goal, to be in that peer group. Now that I have launched into that arena and we’re striving to get there, the local market at some point may get left behind, not in content all the way, but the ability for some of the local advertisers to hang. So, I came up with the idea of Canvas, our new magazine, and the name came from the art side; a blank canvas full of infinite possibilities. And then the other side of the coin is when you move into a new area you canvas the area to see what’s cool and what’s going on. So I took that as the catalyst for Canvas and decided that could be the growth vehicle, a certain level where the main focus would be Art+Design, but we could create an attachable magazine called Canvas Chicago; Canvas New Orleans; Canvas Atlanta; Canvas Miami, and then grow it from there.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up unexpectedly at his home one evening: Sleeping, because I don’t stop. A few years ago, I sort of started over in my life, and I started the magazine at that same time. And I had a painting studio uptown New Orleans that’s literally a 10×10 room and I moved into that and basically took everything that I could make or create and I would put it into the magazine. So, I still live in that 10×10 room; I don’t need anything else because I just come here and sleep. I’m typically always working. If you want to catch me in the afternoon; I’ll probably be at work and we could have dinner, but when I go home, it’s just to fall into bed exhausted.

On what keeps him up at night: Nothing; I’ve come to a place in my life where, and I think it was in the last publisher’s letter before this, you can see some of the stuff I write a lot about, my experiences. One of the things that I used to do was come up with an idea; work like hell to make it come to pass, and then worry it to death. I’d worry about it all of the time. I have since learned through my faith to change my attitude from worrying about everything to having faith that things will work out. So, I haven’t changed my work ethic, I still come up with a zillion ideas and I still tenaciously work hard at it, but rather than worrying about it all of the time, now I have faith that it will either be or not be and I’m leaving that up to God to decide and then I just keep moving forward.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Steve Martin, founder and publisher, Art+Design magazine.

Samir Husni: Congratulations on the national launch of Art+Design. I picked up the magazine recently and loved it.

Steve Martin: Thank you. We’ve been working on it quite a while. We actually, through Curtis Circulation, went global with this issue, so we’re shipping magazines from Iceland, throughout Europe and down into Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, and then Panama, with more countries coming.

Samir Husni: Tell me the story of Art+Design.

Steve Martin: I’m an artist and I have a gallery on Julia Street in New Orleans and have had one there since the 1990s. It has always been a challenge as an artist and a gallery owner to build a sustainable branding campaign through advertising. The cash flow was always so uneven. And it made it difficult to assign contracts to get breaks for advertising in the magazine that we thought would bring buyers to the door.

So, I had always been interested in magazines since I was a kid. I grew up in a little rural town near Alexandria, Louisiana called Tioga. I’d joke around and say the only art they had in the whole town was the calendar that was at the gas station. It was very rural. But somehow in that rural setting I would get my hands on interior design magazines and I was amazed at all of the architecture and interiors that I saw in them. So I started looking at magazines and magazine design, and that was back in the 60s and 70s.

I moved to New Orleans in 1987 and was “discovered” by a gallery owner and I began having one-man shows, building my art career up from there. In the process of my art career, I became the president of the arts district here in New Orleans. And I did that up until Katrina hit. And when I moved to Miami to keep my New Orleans gallery going, I opened up two places and for three years I flew back and forth each month, from New Orleans to Miami. While in Miami, I created an arts district down there called “Miami Art Design and Entertainment District,” which was in what’s now the Design District, and later became Wynwood.

In the process of creating that district, I was trying to figure out a way to advertise the district and what we’d done in New Orleans was to create a walking brochure that basically had a little blurb about each gallery and a map and directory. So, I posed that to the people who became members of that organization down there and we had something that we’d never had in New Orleans, which was money to operate on. We had 110 members and they all put about $2,500, so we had $250,000 of operating cash for the 501(c) (3) to promote ourselves.

The young man that I was working with to create the walking brochure; we sat down and we started thinking about it and he said that this was kind of an opportunity to create something like an airline magazine for our neighborhood, where it’s only shown around in the district and it only writes about the people, the members, who are in the district and it would contain the brochure, but it would have editorial about the galleries and the shops, content that we can basically control. Then all of those people could place their ads around it.

So, we created something called the “Miami Design District Guide.” And it’s still going. The young man that runs it is John White. And he was the publisher; I was just helping with sales and getting the members to come on board.

Then when New Orleans got on its feet and I moved back from Miami, I brought that idea back here and I created a little magazine called “Art New Orleans.” And it was just for the New Orleans arts district. The editorials were about the galleries and artists in the district and advertisers were the art galleries around it. It was very myopic in its vision and it was only about art, therefore subject to the cash flow problems that galleries and artists generally always struggle with. So, it was never really viable; it couldn’t grow. It was a 32-page, saddle stitched magazine and it was promotional in nature. We only wrote about the people who advertised in there, or the district. And it stayed around for seven years; it was just kind of there. But it gave me an opportunity to learn a whole lot about the nature of publishing and what people are looking for and how to work within the industry.

When John White decided that after seven years of not making any money, actually losing money, that he didn’t want to be a part of the New Orleans one anymore, I offered to buy him out and he said no, let’s just let it kind of go away, and I told him that I was going to start another magazine and he said OK, and he went his way and I went mine and it was all on good terms.

I sat for a year thinking about how I wanted to move forward. And what I determined was magazines, basically being myopic in their vision, really got attention from the academic crowd, from other gallery owners and from other artists and teachers. And those were people interested in art and interested in seeing themselves in print and interested in what was going on in the art world. But it didn’t really bring a lot of art buyers in. And that’s what sustains the business.

So, I started thinking about where people were coming from when it came to my own art and it was the luxury market. And I began to think about luxury lifestyle magazines and how when you look at W Magazine, they have an art editorial in there and it really means something, and there’s Architectural Digest that has an art essay in it and it really just stands out.

I came up with the idea of creating a magazine that encompassed art, design and the experience of that luxury lifestyle and that’s where Art+Design came from. It’s a simple name, and because it’s so simple, I guess that’s why it was still there. I started looking for magazine names to name the publication and it seemed like everything that I could think of for a name had already been taken and was a magazine somewhere in the world. Finally it just came down to Art+Design, which is what it is, and that wasn’t taken and it worked, and it said what we were going to do.

So, the whole concept behind the magazine’s vision looked at every aspect of the luxury lifestyle through an artistic lens, and used that as the catalyst to write about whatever we wrote about, so it could be fashion or whatever; it’s an artistic view about fashion. Or if it’s an interior design, it’s an artist’s residence or an artistic view of the residence, because it’s different or it has a great art collection. And I thought that was something that may show up in other magazines, but it isn’t really focused on in other magazines. And that was the catalyst for the nature of what we were going to put out.

Samir Husni: Why did you feel that a printed magazine was the best platform for you to promote the art district and that luxury lifestyle?

Steve Martin: Having experience with art, I know the Internet is a great research engine and it allows you to get out and look around to determine where things are that you might like or what you might like, but it’s not a great vehicle for selling art. You don’t know what you get until you have bought it and received it by mail basically. When you buy a painting, I think it’s a lot more of a tactile experience. You want to walk up to it and look at it; you want to touch it and have that intimate experience of being next to it when you’re thinking about bringing it home and putting it on your wall.

And while the Internet shows you what’s out there, it’s not what you always see. There are images that look great on the Internet, but once you see them in person, they’re not that hot. So, I think someone spending $25,000 and up for a painting rarely will buy it sight unseen on the Internet, unless it has provenance that it’s to an artist they have already experienced on some more intimate level in person.

Taking that idea and putting it back to the magazine; it’s like when people look at an artwork, they want to have a tactile experience, so picking up a magazine and looking at it, feeling the weight of the magazine in your hand, the thickness of the paper, the high visual quality of what’s on the page; it kind of creates a world that you can get sucked into. It captures your attention and your emotions, and you can experience it by holding it in your hand, take it home with you and read it at your leisure. It’s just a completely, I think, more rewarding experience than looking at an online magazine.

Samir Husni: And why did you make the decision to have a magazine that is still based in New Orleans, but now also global?

Steve Martin: I’ve always thought of New Orleans as an international city. And I experienced a little bit of frustration in Miami because it was another international city and I thought the closeness in the culture would make it a really easy transition. I really enjoyed Miami but the perception that people from different parts of the world have of New Orleans is quite different than what people in New Orleans think. We had Katrina going on at that time, and then there was the mayor of New Orleans who was always in the news with something he had done, and most of what people thought of about New Orleans was that it was a great place to visit, very historic, a lot of fun because of Bourbon Street and the French Quarter, but other than that people thought of it as being very provincial.

And being from Louisiana and New Orleans; New Orleans has definitely injected into the world a great number of very influential people: writers, artists and musicians. It’s the birthplace of jazz and there’s quite a bit of culture that has permeated the world from New Orleans. I was thought that New Orleans was on the same level as New York and Paris in its cultural impact. And I really thought it should be elevated and there was nothing in New Orleans that elevated New Orleans or made anyone think of anything that they weren’t already thinking, which was that we were provincial.

So, when I started this thing out I wanted it to be an international magazine. It was never meant to just stay local. My long-term vision was to launch it into the international public eye as quickly as possible.

Samir Husni: In your letter from the publisher you quote Tennessee Williams: the United States has three major cities, New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans. And everywhere else is Cleveland.

Samir Husni: There are plenty of magazines in New Orleans; why do you think it took so long for someone like yourself to come along and recognize what a cultural hub New Orleans is and that it should be made more global than it already is by documenting that globalization?

Steve Martin: It’s a little bit of that provincial nature that everyone saw from outside New Orleans. They weren’t off; it is provincial in a way. It’s a hip little city and a tight community. It’s done a certain way.

One of the things that I run into a lot is there are some advertisers here that aren’t global, but could be global advertisers. And I’ve approached them with the magazine and they’re not interested in advertising because we’re not a social magazine. All of the other magazines in New Orleans pretty much are social. There are pictures of who’s who, where they work, and the party, who they were with and so on. And that’s the local attitude. I don’t think they thought they could be more than what they were. They’ve been like they have for so long and that’s all that has mattered. New Orleans is somewhat isolated in its business culture; people do a lot of business out of New Orleans in different places, but it’s kind of closely-held here. I guess. And I don’t think they’ve dared to have the vision to see themselves in that arena somehow.

And there was really nothing else out there for them to do, it was kind of just what was available, I guess. I haven’t seen anything like that available to them in the 20 years that I’ve been here, a magazine that would not be just locally oriented.

Samir Husni: As an artist, do you believe that as long as there’s art, there will be print?

Steve Martin: Yes. I think that the demise of print magazines is premature. I don’t think that the Internet can give the experience that a magazine does. Now, will it kill off the weaker magazines; yes, it’s already done that. You’ve seen the decline in the print market and that’s due to the weaning process that’s heightened by the Internet. I don’t think that you get a chance to hang around if you’re not staying alive by figuring out how to stay alive. You have to be proactive in it. You can’t just create it, then let it coast.

Samir Husni: How do you do that? How are you being creative and not just letting it coast? How are you being proactive with Art+Design?

Steve Martin: We’re assignment driven, so we get submissions all of the time, but that’s never really worked out for us, so it’s really just keeping our eyes opened and looking at world trends. One of the things that I try to do, and is an interesting direction, I think, is that because New Orleans is that international city; we look for stories that are in the world and either have some thread back to New Orleans, and that can be really thin, or from a story that’s already here and has some effect out in the world.

We just try and keep our ears to the ground and really look for interesting things to write about because we want our editorial to be strong. It’s not a pay-to-play magazine, so we have a wall of separation between the editorials and the advertising, which is another thing that New Orleans is kind of bad about. It’s like all of the advertising here drives the editorial in most of the magazines. Not all of it, but a lot of it; a good portion of it.

In my experience with Art New Orleans, which was a little art promotional magazine that I did, it was all promotional and one of the comments that we received was, after a while people realized that you were only written about if you paid for it, and so it lost some of its impact. So, we made a decision to, with the creation of this magazine, or I made a decision, to keep that completely separate. You cannot buy an ad and get an article. It has to stand on its own legs. We don’t punish you if you’re an advertiser with a good story, we’ll write about it. But the key is it has to be a good story.

So with that said we look for good interesting stories. We’re not investigative journalism, it’s a lot of feel-good stuff; it’s not pie-in-the-sky stuff, we just like to write entertaining stories with witty and pithy commentary and points-of-view that people will enjoy reading. If you have a strong, visual content with no story behind it, it’s going to be just fluff, so we put in what we think are strong readable stories and then try to amaze everybody with the visual content, which is the art side of it.

Samir Husni: What has been the biggest stumbling block that you’ve had to face and how did you overcome it?

Steve Martin: I guess it was the money because I started with none. I didn’t have a backer; it’s self-sustaining, I guess. The way that I created it was I took a notepad and I laid out 80 pages, hand-drawn in the notepad, and then I went into Vanity Fair, Vogue and Architectural Digest and Art News and tore pages out of those magazines and then created an 80-page, stapled together copy of those stripped out pages and I walked around the city and I showed people my notebook of what I wanted to design and what I wanted the layout of the magazine to be and the concept behind it, and then I showed them the ads and the stories that were in the stripped out pages that I had, and I said this is what I’m shooting for, for my magazine to be of this caliber and quality and this level of publication.

And I basically sold enough ads from that to start it, so the difficulty has been every issue for the first four years now has been hand-to-mouth. There hasn’t been a cash cushion, so that makes things pretty nerve-wracking from time to time. And it’s based on what we sell in ads as to how thick the magazine is going to be and we’ve been blessed by people getting onboard and staying with us.

Samir Husni: You mentioned that you’re an artist, so do you paint or sculpt; what type of art do you create?

Steve Martin: My website is stevemartinfineart.com and I paint, sculpt and draw. I make prints. I’m self-taught, so I haven’t run into anything that I haven’t tried. (Laughs) I’m always experimenting. Again, I came from a little town and I have always been an artist. I won a competition when I was five years old and I got to go on television for an art piece that I did. And that’s when I decided that I wanted to be an artist. I got all that attention and some candy. And I’ve stayed with it.

My father was a contractor, a practical man who taught me business and the values of hard work and determination. A lot of what I’ve done is that I haven’t known any better. I didn’t know that I couldn’t do something, so I just tried it and was determined to make it work.

Samir Husni: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Steve Martin: Art+Design is meant to be the global magazine, I want it to be on par with Vanity Fair, Town & Country, Architectural Digest; all of those magazines. That’s been the goal, to be in that peer group. Now that I have launched into that arena and we’re striving to get there, the local market at some point may get left behind, not in content all the way, but the ability for some of the local advertisers to hang.

So, I thought about how I wanted to expand this thing, what model I wanted to follow. One of the models that I looked at was modern luxury magazines and they have the different city magazines, such as Houston, C.S., and D.C. They have 26 labels. A certain percentage of each magazine is national content, similar across the board, and then depending on the local sales team’s ability, another percentage is for that city. And I thought that was one growth model, but it seemed cumbersome for what I had to work with here.

So, I came up with the idea of Canvas, our new magazine, and the name came from the art side; a blank canvas full of infinite possibilities. And then the other side of the coin is when you move into a new area you canvas the area to see what’s cool and what’s going on. So I took that as the catalyst for Canvas and decided that could be the growth vehicle, a certain level where the main focus would be Art+Design, but we could create an attachable magazine called Canvas Chicago; Canvas New Orleans; Canvas Atlanta; Canvas Miami, and then grow it from there.

That was the thinking, how to bring local promotional content into magazine without compromising the integrity of the magazine. And I came up with creating a separate magazine that goes along with it where you could write profiles and you could put in advertorials and do things that were a little bit more local-based. I jokingly say that it’s going to be a cross between Scout Guide and Where Magazine.

Samir Husni: If I showed up unexpectedly to your home one evening after work, what would I find you doing; reading a magazine, reading your iPad, watching television, painting, or something else?

Steve Martin: Sleeping, because I don’t stop. A few years ago, I sort of started over in my life, and I started the magazine at that same time. And I had a painting studio uptown New Orleans that’s literally a 10×10 room and I moved into that and basically took everything that I could make or create and I would put it into the magazine. So, I still live in that 10×10 room; I don’t need anything else because I just come here and sleep. I’m typically always working. If you want to catch me in the afternoon; I’ll probably be at work and we could have dinner, but when I go home, it’s just to fall into bed exhausted.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Steve Martin: Nothing; I’ve come to a place in my life where, and I think it was in the last publisher’s letter before this, you can see some of the stuff I write a lot about, my experiences. One of the things that I used to do was come up with an idea; work like hell to make it come to pass, and then worry it to death. I’d worry about it all of the time.

I have since learned through my faith to change my attitude from worrying about everything to having faith that things will work out. So, I haven’t changed my work ethic, I still come up with a zillion ideas and I still tenaciously work hard at it, but rather than worrying about it all of the time, now I have faith that it will either be or not be and I’m leaving that up to God to decide and then I just keep moving forward. If something fails, it’s a learning experience that I can incorporate into the next thing. I’ve had enough successes and failures in life to know that it’s life and mountains and valleys come and you never know where they’re going to be, you just have to have your head on right so that you can get through whatever. If you’re at the top of the mountain, don’t let it give you the big head, and if you’re in the valley, don’t despair.

Samir Husni: Thank you.