It is no big secret that I am a huge fan of a well-planned magazine. I subscribe to a few, usually by signing up under various names and never paying for them, or taking them from other establishments. You may think this is shady, but I attribute my love for magazines as the sole reason for their rise in popularity over the past several years; you wouldn’t even be able to buy them if it wasn’t for me.
But something brought about by even the most prestigious of periodicals pisses me off. In fact, I received an issue of Rolling Stone just today that did that very thing. I looked at the cover, wondered how they delivered it without having my address on it, flipped it over to not only find the missing address label, but a parallel cover. It always makes me think I’m on LSD. Regardless, that shit pisses me off.
But what pisses me off even more is the fact that sometimes the sides are not even. The first side, or at least the side I’m on that I will assume is the first side, because I have no way of actually knowing, will be drastically shorter than the other. It’s like dating a girl who has one double D breast and one B cup; if you all have twins they’ll be Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito. One is 20 pages, the other is 49, and you have no clue which one is going to be more entertaining, because whatever is on the cover is only there to entice you to buy the damn magazine, but obviously this magazine needed two covers to do that.
This also gives some jackass the idea that they should put in twice as many insert cards. Instead of getting one every six pages, you get one every three. Brilliant strategy. Instead of relying on the content and word of mouth, combined with advertising, you now have twice as many inserts that will fall on the ground when I thumb through the mag. Your plan of people walking down the street and finding your subscription inserts, filling them out, and then doubling your reader base has succeeded. Take a bow, preferably on a sword.
I’ve got nothing else.