Industry Update: Interweave aquires Four New Magazine Titles

Yesterday, via Folio, we learned that Nielsen Business Media has sold four of its titles to Interweave, a unit of Aspire Media. As of yesterday, American Artist, Drawing, Watercolor, and Workshop magazines are all Interweave pubs, and while that may not seem like a big deal, it indicates a strength in the economy of crafting and creativity that is not being exhibited elsewhere in the magazine world.

Nielsen (gigantic! world power! Nielsen!) is shedding a few titles to Aspire, who predominantly publishes enthusiast titles. Enthusiast magazines (think, Dog Fancy or Hot Boats--the ads cater to the reader) typically weather economic downturns well, while regular old glossy magazines (think People, Life--the ads are for a more general audience) do not. Since acquiring Interweave in 2005, Aspire has increased the number of Interweave magazine titles from six to 21. Wowza! Aspire is on a mainline to craft city by creating a huge creative title catalog and clearly sees a huge potential for the genre. All of which is good news for crafters. Craft suppliers will continue to advertise. Project makers and pattern designers will continue to publish. And more importantly, Marimello will continue to have something to read on the train.

Teen Vogue does DIY

Not being teens anytime this century, we are unfamiliar with the goings on of Teen Vogue. Back in day, we had Sassy, YM and Seventeen to get our fashion/advice fix. But it's good to see that these days Teen Vogue is keeping in touch with the DIY scene and the teen fascination with couture.

We find this interesting because in our crafty world, recreating couture falls under the umbrella of subversion. Of course this is a fairly recent association to make given that crafters, more specifically seamstresses and tailors, have been recreating the latest fashions for centuries. This whole buying off the rack thing is a wee babe in the grand old house of fashion when you think about it.

But the Teen Vogue articles, from Marchesa to Zac Posen, all involve and highlight the original designers. This is more about giving teens access to high fashion and allowing them to tweak and customize the designs.

Now don't get us wrong. We're all for getting the kids crafting, but we're really hoping two things:

1) That no one is getting parental help on this project. Again, it's not that we don't enjoy mommy's sweaters (xoxo! Mom), but having you mom do your 4th grade math homework didn't go over well with Mrs. Westra then and it doesn't go over with Marimello now.

2) That the theme of making your own stuff doesn't go right over the teens' heads. While it is AWESOME to have your own Tory Burch-esque v-neck avec signature dickie, it's not so awesome to own one that was made by some one who made less than the change you pump into a soda machine in passing period.

We're hoping that the brilliant teens of today figure out how that DIY is a responsible choice and alternative to pawing through cheap knockoffs at the Rack. Not that we made any responsible decisions until we were age 25 or so, but we can always hope.

Check out Teen Vogue's DIY here. And for more on Marimello's irresponsible descision making skills, just try googling us. Back in our day the WAS no MySpace. Back in my day we left no digital footprints and whatever we were doing out so late is lost in the sands of time. Fer Sure.

CRAFT and MAKE flix

Oh CRAFT, how do we love thee? Well we can count one more reason to love CRAFT now--a new DVD rental service. With everything from airbrushing to tatting, visual learners (Marimello included) now have a one stop shop for instructional DVDs. And for you MAKE fans, there's a MAKE service too.

We're looking forward to receiving Kente--Woven Ceremonial Cloths of Ghana. And though the price is a little steep ($9.99 for 48 minutes, gulp) we're pretty sure we're not going to find this one on any shelf of our local rental shop.

Did Etsy Just Get Better

If you haven't already heard, Etsy retired the Etsy Garden Blog earlier this week and debuted the Storque. We think this is a much more interesting way of presenting the goings on of Etsy, and we're happy to see so many Etsians who can write their way out of a paper bag. But what do you think? Will this format fly? On an internet that is absolutely swamped with online mags, does the Storque still reflect the innovation we normally associate with the web design behind Etsy?
As always, Marimello if obsessing over new marketing tools, so we're interested to see what you think of this infant Storque. Leave a comment, or contact us directly and let us know what you think.

Save the World Sunday

The latest issue of Wired appeared in our mailbox recently. We do not remember subscribing, but being the voracious magazine readers we are, we did not complain.
We especially did not complain when we read Clive Thompson's article "Count on the Geeks to Rescue the Earth." It's online too so go check it out.
Thompson brought our attention to the interesting research Paul Slovic is doing on decision making. Slovic has discovered that people are more inclined to help a singular person in need over a group of people who share the same need. It's not that we are stingy, just that we're better at conceptualizing the plight of smaller groups and terrible when it comes to larger groups. Thompson's point is that this is why people like Bill Gates are good at tackling large scale third world diseases through philanthropy. Geeks are better wired to conceptualize big numbers. "We look at the huge numbers and go numb. Gates looks at them and runs the moral algorithm: Preventable death = bad; preventable death x 1 million people = 1 million times as bad."
Uh huh. Sounds simple enough. What does it have to do with crafting? Well we got to thinking about how in fiber arts particularly deal with large numbers. Cast on a sweater in the round lately? Calculate the number of threads needed for the warp and weft of your pattern? If we too conceptualize large numbers well, Slovic's research and Thompson's suggestion probably explains crafters' ability to launch large scale charity projects. It also suggests a root for the optimism with which these efforts are launched. 12 stitches = pattern; 12 stitches x 100,000 = afghan; afghan x 1 million = afghans for an entire country.
And if that's not inspiring food for a Sunday afternoon's though, well we don't know what.

Should I Stay or Should I Go: Weekend Plans

We here at Marimello are too bogged down with important work to even consider setting foot outside the house this weekend and if you're like us, you have a will of steel! However you also might need some distraction in between moments of inspiration. What a conundrum.
There, there, Marimello will make it all better…

You should stay:
International Fiber Collective needs your help to cover a gas station with craft. So craft a 3'x3' square and send it on in.
Craft and Adorn both have new issues out. Get thee to a bookstore (ok that means going a little bit out) and cuddle up with your mags.
But if the bookstore is too much of a trip there's always a bit of reading to do online. May we suggest you peruse Sisterhood of the Needle. Our favorite is definitely the mother-daughter team who both needed shoulder surgery after too much knitting. Cheesey? Yes, but Marimello likes it too.
Finally, nothing says distraction like a good i-cord project. And nothing says too much time on your hands like a headphone cord cozy. But surly you can think of something that needs an initial a la LaVerne and Shirley, or maybe some one you love needs a curse word emblazoned on a pennant.
Or you could do your work...sigh.

You should go:
Giant Robot NY is showing Susie Ghahremani's work and there is an opening tomorrow. You all know Susie from Boy Girl Party. The best part is Susie will be there handing out free copies of Craft and sample of the sampler.
Down New Zealand way, you can hit up Craft 2.0. Our noses have been pointed decidedly south ever since we heard about Lynda Dorrington's plans to turn Perth (yeah yeah we know, different country) into some sort of arts and crafts utopia.
Back on this side of the equator, there's a Recraft Fair happening in Somerville, MA on Saturday. Besides music and loads of free stuff, our friends from Magpie will be there.
Also free and also tomorrow, there's Craftanostra, hosted by the St. Louis Craft Mafia. If you had a private jet, you could make both events, because Craftanostra goes until 1 a.m. Best part? Drinks at the bar.
If you're in our neck of the woods, head over to Fiber Fest in Santa Monica. We might duck out for a moment and head over too. We hear there's an alpaca that needs petting.
And while alpaca-petting may get us out of the house for a moment or two, this Toronto event is our favorite. Maybe it's their offer of weenies, or maybe it's because 20 vendors are all cramming into some one's backyard. More likely it's that afterward, they having a clothing swap and chocolate tasting.

Oh did we say we were going to make your weekend easier? We meant harder.

Image Ann Taintor. She is hilarious.

We are beginning to love Jezebel. With this new installation of LOLVogue, they finally seem to prove their understanding of our love of crafting and our fascination with over analysis of idiosyncratic web speak.

Now if someone will just put together a LOL Craftzine blog, we can ROFL until we dies.

Ideas Unbound: Interview with David Bernstein Part II

Digital content (i.e. your patterns, your words, your pics) will find an audience who doesn’t want or need to pay. This is faboo if you are posting on say Instructables, but not so if you are trying to make a buck. So, we’re back with part deux of the David Bernstein interview where in we discuss the desire for digital content to be free, what gets the New Pamphleteer out the door, and the future of print in the digital age. The New Pamphleteer has embraced the ideas which big publishing houses have not and has big plans for navigating the murky waters between print and digital formats.

M: Many publishers, small and large, are worried about giving away any scrap of their merchandise, including allowing access to a book via Google Book Search or Amazon Search Inside the Book. But you send out an ebook version of your pamphlets to everyone who orders. While we may be so sated with the instant readability, who says we're not gonna turn around, print it out and circulate it our damn selves?

DB: Our mantra on this is unoriginal, but true: Digital content wants to be free. Ebooks are to, me, a not particularly attractive product as a reader. What advantage do they have, as currently constituted, over printed books? The bottom line is, if someone really wants the content, they want to own it in physical form. If they only want to read it, but aren't willing to pay ... well, they would just borrow the printed book from a friend or a library, or but a used copy fro a buck from Amazon. For us, ebooks are just an easier way to let people pass around our stuff to their friends, which I don’t see as a bad thing. The more people who see our pamphlets, the better it is for us. Marketing guru Seth Godin proved this a few years ago, when he gave away the ebook version of one of his books and saw sales of the physical copies skyrocket. Most publishers are terrified of this model, but we're pretty certain that it’s what the future will hold – at least until someone comes up with a more interesting (meaning interactive and fun) way of creating ebooks. Which I might add, is one of our goals as well.

M: Your background in big publishing houses suggests to us that you've had lots of lots of in-house resources—designers, copyeditors, publicists, worker bees, knuckle draggers, etc. Are the Pamphlet Guys handling these tasks with freelancers or what?

DB: We have a VERY talented pool of freelancers who do our design, copyediting, and publicity. But we also do quite a bit ourselves.

M: Aside from revolutionize publishing and the digital stream of consciousness on the web, have you got any big plans in the works? Because we think you are onto something. We think the fate of creative industries, and those that support them lie in the hands of the indies.

DB: As I alluded to earlier, we have big plans for the future relating to ebooks. Print and digital are going to continue to converge in ways that are difficult to predict, but we plan to be right at the center of it, creating a whole range of innovative products. Our logo says "The Future of Print in a Digital Age" which I think sums it up perfectly. Print is going to look different. Digital is going to look different, as our ways of accessing content continue to evolve as a result of new products and technologies. And I think the line between the two will just get blurrier.

Martha Martha Martha!

Much to the glee of the interns Martha made the cover of Wired. What do they know, they're nerds. If Martha wants a cover, she has five, count 'em, five perfectly good magazines on which to to plaster her face. But after much nagging, we had to take a peek at the queen's latest edict and we weren't half pissed the interns brought it to our attention. DIY, to Martha is "about using your hands and your mid to make things work better. Whether you're a programmer or a seamstress, it's all about new techniques, simplifying old techniques, and consolidating steps. Making things go faster--but not worse. Better."
We like it Martha. Why pretend to be something lesser when you know what you're capable of doing is better?

Of All the Useless...

TTD sounds like something your mother might tell you about in a hushed voice. Maybe as part of the "beautiful cycle" conversation. But it is highly unlikely, in the event that your mother paid for your wedding dress, that she will give you any hint at all what TTD might be. So get this. TTD is Trashing the Dress.
Trashing. The. Dress.
The how-many-hundred-dollar-dress.
A couple of days ago The New York Times ran an odd, though not particularly authoritative piece on this popular new post-wedding trend. To us it seems almost as odd to us as paying $2500 for a dress that is only worn once. And while we are inclined immediately to point you toward any number of donation links in an effort to stop the wanton destruction of couture (oh yes, we have been known to support a closet's right to contain an article of couture or two), we are also wondering if this is not another example of a message getting lost in artistic translation. If you are really feeling so anti-wedding after the main event, why include the parts of the main event to which you are opposed? (We are guessing TTD has something to do with resenting the dress and the tendency toward intense dieting before the wedding, but we aren't going to go there today.) Why not make the main event more personal and a celebration of the new life one couple has chosen for themselves?
Now tawk amongst yawselves.
Modern crafters, of all people, are familiar with modifying traditions. If not because they are currently subverting tradtition with their crafts, then at least because crafting is intrinsically rooted in personalization of patterns. So here's a couple of ideas:
Though the contest may be over, but there's a lot of inspiring ways to use toilet paper, yes toilet paper, at Cheap Chic Weddings.
Or pick up this month's issue of Ready Made (our sometimes petty bitch target) and check out Todd Oldham's column, Hot Toddy for a super cute pattern to make yourself.
This is not to say that we think keeping the dress, however clever, in a box that looks as if half the woman is still wearing it is not equally odd. Check out The I Do Foundation, Making Memories, and let any brides maids know about The Princess Project.

Snail Mail Gets Slimier

If you love your real life inbox as much as you do your inbox online, you need to know the postal rate hike affects you too! Big time. While we were madly untangling yarn from our cat's clutches, our good friend PR Couture was trying to remind us that the postal service is providing big discounts for big publishers, and laying the brunt of the cost on smaller magazines.

Obviously if you’re reading this, you’re not paying postage, but our Mari-sense says you subscribe to a mag or two from a smaller press. Now while the USPS monopoly on your indie faves' ability to deliver, might make your fist start to curl, you might consider that this monopoly has not always been a bad thing. By keeping rates uniform for both indie mags and big publishing houses, USPS has actually encouraged competition from smaller presses. For hundreds of years, they have wanted everyone to have the same ability to disseminate information with their service. Now thanks to a suggestion by Time Warner, not only do smaller publications have to struggle a little more with their postal rates, but fewer might enter the market.

For more information on what is facing these smaller magazines and how to help, check out the little stamp on your right, visit The Nation’s EIC blog post Big Business Invades Your Mailbox, and sign the petition.

Marimello hearts CROQ: interview with Heather Mann

To be fair, we here at Marimello heart all magazines. But, our newest fave is CROQ, a fairly new, independently published zine devoted, and we mean devoted, to the new crafts scene and indie business. We also had the honor of chatting up Heather Mann, editor and publisher, about CROQ and about zines, magazines, promotion and why it’s OK for DIY not to mean DI-all-Y

Like most great ideas, CROQ is the child of necessity. Two years ago that Dayna Mankowski of CraftyScientist.com popped up on the Sampler LiveJournal voicing a need for a collaborative print zine about crafts and the crafty lifestyle. There simply wasn’t such a thing in existence. Heather says, “The idea for CROQ came out of the excitement of the crafting community that had emerged online -- we wanted to use that excitement to create something that wasn't just an online thing, but an actual print zine. Also, there weren't really ANY magazines out there at the time that focused on the hip/indie craft crowd, so we wanted to make the magazine that we all wished existed.”
“A zine is basically just a self-published magazine. We do everything ourselves, thus the distinctive "zine" instead of just the ubiquitous "magazine." And, we are an actual in-print on-paper publication, not just an internet-only publication therefore, we're not the same as a blog. We wanted to be on paper, not just in cyberspace.”

M: Agreed! What’s the significance you see in moving from online to print. How is that important/significant? Why not just start another Web site? There’s been some hemming and hawing about the decline of print media.
H: A magazine is a self-contained work that is put into print, and then becomes the definitive version of itself. CROQ #4 will always be the same in future print runs as it was when the very first print rolled out. A website is more amorphous. The look gets updated, the content is edited. Things are tweaked. If a print publication is a still-life, then a website is a temporary art installation. Here today, gone (or different) tomorrow.

M: Do you see CROQ growing from “distinctive zine” into a ubiquitous” magazine? Do you think that is a natural progression, or something different?
H: Yes, CROQ has the potential to grow into a magazine. We have a unique point of view, and we are covering some topics that nobody else in magazine publishing is covering. Our potential audience are the young crafters who are on the internet looking for the next big inspiration. So hopefully what you said about some people rejecting print media for the internet exclusively isn't true of those young crafters out there who are our potential readership! I think a jump from zine to magazine would help older readers (those who aren't familiar or comfortable with the sassy 'zine, or who don't find info on the internet) find our publication. So, zines are "distinctive" because they are much more specific and narrow in focus. Magazines become ubiquitous because in order to appeal to a larger audience, they broaden their focus.

M: You use the word integrity in reference to growth. We think integrity is a huge word. For whatever definition you use, integrity is something to maintain. We too think it is possible to maintain that integrity, voice, creedo, whatever too, but we sense an implication that integrity can be lost through the process. What are your thoughts on this in relation to CROQ's and in the larger picture, the craft culture's growth?
H: It's the age old punk rock argument of "selling out" versus being "punk rock." If you maintain any measure of success, those who are still stuck in obscurity call you a sellout. In reality, if the same team is planning, writing, and designing CROQ, then does it really matter if we staple it ourselves? It doesn't fundamentally change our voice or our message.

M: So then what of self-promotion? Is self-promotion DIY—like DI-all-Y—an essential part of the process, or it is something you can farm out?
H: Well, we're getting to the breaking point as far as doing it ALL ourselves goes. Our staff is located around the country, and nobody is close enough to team up to do the physical labor part (printing, stapling, folding, packing orders). Order volume is getting to the point where it might be nice to farm some of it out - either have it printed somewhere else, or just hire someone to help with the assembly. I think the publication maintains its integrity regardless of how much of the physical labor is done in-house.

M: So with all this growth, how are you promoting CROQ now?
H: Right now, we advertise on the internet, we sometimes sponsor events (like the Indie Craft Experience in Atlanta), we swap promos with other indie businesses, we receive press coverage from magazines and websites, and we do craft shows. At the moment, that's all we can do.
Plans for growth include a better compensation plan for our writers. We would like to increase our circulation, too. I would love to tap into some of the 85,000 registered members of Craftster.org. Do you hear me, girls?

We hear you, Heather. Here are some CROQ submission guidelines. Submit to it. Subscribe to it. Love it. Read it three times before you go to bed like Marimello.

Adorn hearts Etsy hearts Adorn

Listen up Etsy peeps! Adorn Magazine is offering up a discounted subscription price! Just the sort of thing Marimello likes to hear. Adorn frequently features Etsy products so give the love back with a subscription.

It would be remiss of Marimello not to point out that Adorn is published by SoHo Publishing Co, the very same publisher of Vogue Knitting whose association with subversive knitting we so recently questioned.

Where Vogue Knitting is your best friend's ever-glamorous older sister, Adorn might wear doc martens one day and stilettos the next. But that is not to say that she is particularly subversive either--just quirky. Adorn branches out into other crafty veins and offers as they say in their most recent editor's letter "projects that [are] fun and fashionable, that would appeal to your whole lifestyle, not just keep your hands busy."

But even if you are looking for a little something to keep your hands busy, Adorn is there for ya.
Marimello dares you to say no to the bunny.