Christopher Phin

I’m extremely fortunate that I rarely have to pitch story ideas to an editor to generate work – most of what I do is offered to me to accept or decline as loyalty, interest, other commitments and my bank balance dictate – but as a general rule, on those occasions when I do, I pitch several ideas at once, and they tend to fall into four main categories.

• Ideas that are easy money (though are still something I think they and their readers will like), usually because they require minimal research or asset-gathering
• Ideas that will be a pain in the arse to research and write but which are interesting and which stretch me, professionally, and so are worth the arse-pain
• Ideas that mean me getting to do or use something I’m interested in at a personal level
• Ideas that I think are important and that have either been covered in an opaque, unsympathetic or generally unuseful format hitherto, or just plain haven’t been covered – at least in a high-profile enough place for enough people to have seen it

I’m fascinated by Boden, the clothing company, both from an editorial and a business perspective. Almost every time we get an email, catalogue or promotion from them, my wife (who like me works in publishing) and I have cause to comment on how perfectly pitched their editorial sensibilities are, and how well they anticipate the desires of and engage with customers.

To take one tiny example, look at this catalogue for kids’ clothes that just dropped through our letterbox and prompted me to write this.

On the right there’s a bound-in sheet of stickers, with the line “Not all fish live in the water. These ones can go anywhere.” All well and cute, you might say – something that will appeal to a sense of whimsy in a grown-up as well as directly to children – but they’ve taken it one step further; bottom-left it says “These fish also live on the clothes in our catalogue. Can you find them all?”. Genius! That way, they encourage children to scour the catalogue, looking at every item of clothing, and so bringing to bear the full force of pester power on their parents.

Naturally, this will miss the target in many households. It might arrive at households that don’t have kids – the customer intelligence algorithms having been fooled by a one-off order of a child’s dress as a gift, for example – and even in those households that do, the kids might never get their hands on the catalogue, even assuming they wanted to. And I don’t know the cost of these stickers, nor how much difference they’d make to overall sales. Even tracking the ROI would be tricky. But my gut is that it would cost pennies yet generate pounds – and all without being obnoxious. Negligible effort and investment; potentially huge effect.

I’d urge senior-ish publishing folks to become Boden customers to see what it does and how; the lessons might not translate directly, but I’m filled with admiration for its smart engagements with customers and its clever use of techniques we thought we had a monopoly on. What a fascinating place to work.

A recent post by Jason Snell on Six Colors particularly resonated with me:

When I was at Macworld, the weight of an article could be quite oppressive. If you had something interesting to say, but it really couldn’t bear more than a few paragraphs, you had two choices: Just swallow it and not write anything, or fluff it up with empty filler until it seemed more substantial than it actually was. […] A lot of interesting, albeit small, stuff would just fall to the floor and be swept away with the other detritus at the end of the day: Amusing, interesting tidbits that would never be seen because they didn’t cross some imaginary threshold.

I’ll go even further: it’s very easy, when you’re acting as the mouthpiece for an important brand, to fall into the bad habit of not sharing something through its channels because it seems unimportant or trivial. There’s a feeling that unless you’re pretty sure it’s going to generate substantial levels of traffic or engagement, you shouldn’t waste your time doing it.

One of the nice things about not being in that position any more is that I can do whatever I damned well please. I have no KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) against this website; it’s no more and no less than my corner of the internet, for me to play in as I see fit.

I pitched my little titbit on locking your phone to someone, and they declined it. Fair enough; this is exactly the kind of trivial, throwaway punt I’m talking about. With nothing to lose, I quickly threw it together; as I write this, the tutorial video has been viewed over 23,000 times.

This is an anecdote rather than empirical evidence; it’s just as likely this little tutorial could have gotten a couple of hundred views and quietly died. Neither is it evidence that I have an unerring instinct for what will work. It’s not even necessarily a criticism of the cautious, results-oriented environment fostered in big publishing companies. It did, though, get me thinking again about where that attitude comes from, who’s ‘to blame’ for it – companies imposing it implicitly or explicitly, or employees inferring it correctly or incorrectly? – and whether it’s right or wrong.

Should big publishers start being much less precious about their corner of the internet? Can they?

When Peter mentioned that he was starting a little project ahead of Magfest to collect into a book the honest 100-word reactions of a hundred people working at the coalface of magazine publishing, I expressed some concerns. Oh, I had no doubt he could do it, or that the result would be interesting, but I worried that unless he allowed anonymous submissions, it would end up being hagiographic and present an imbalanced view of the industry.

I needn’t have worried.

It’s not, to be sure, filled with invective and doom, and there are some submissions that seem to describe a thriving, bullish, even arrogant industry that I just can’t recognise, but through some strange alchemy he’s managed to create a fascinating little vignette whose very variety gives it a clear voice with which to describe the magazine business in 2014.

If you’re interested in magazines – either from the inside or the outside – I think you’d find The Magazine Diaries intriguing. It’s a fiver, and the proceeds support MagAid.