Think of the most trivial past time and, chances are, there is a specialist magazine devoted to it. Not a thin magazine either but page after glossy page devoted to the game of darts or the delights of needlepoint. Look along the shelves at your local bookstore and you will find titles so obscure that sales must rank in the hundreds rather than the thousands. It’s not who buys these magazines that fascinates me but who publishes them and why. For example, I’m told we produce more motoring publications in this country than the UK and yet there’s still room for a publication totally devoted to cars that run on diesel. What next I wonder—a magazine called “White Panel Van Monthly”?
You have to admire their dedication though. Just imagine the effort that goes into putting together a specialist publication. Editing a golf magazine must be a doddle compared with editing a darts magazine. With a new golf course opening in South Africa every month, there’s plenty of opportunity for articles describing the intricacies of the course, a bit of blurb about who designed it, plus space for lots of photos of golfers teeing off on a perfectly mown fairway with the ocean as a backdrop and a few faux Tuscan villas scattered about. Top golfers make a fortune and there’s scope for articles about their glamorous lifestyles, their choice of private jet, and where they’re building their next holiday home. Pad all that out with some expert advice on how to correct your slice, where to buy those strange checked trousers favoured by so many Americans, and what set of titanium clubs to get to improve your game and you have a pretty good magazine. Providing you change the names and move some of the pictures around you can do the same thing next month and the month after and the readers will still buy it.
It’s not so easy with darts. Apart from the fact that one dart board looks very much like another, the game of darts is generally played by unattractive individuals with large beer guts, bad dress sense and lank greasy hair. They don’t earn huge purses compared with golfers and they’re more likely to travel in a battered Ford Sierra than a Gulfstream jet. Not a lot to work with, you may think, but you’re forgetting one thing. This magazine will be bought by people with large beer guts, bad dress sense and lank greasy hair, and the only difference between them and those featured in the magazine is that they can’t score 180 every time they throw three darts. Like the golfers, they’re supposedly buying the magazine to read about their role models—well, to look at the pictures at any rate. Of course, no amount of pretending will convince advertisers that the typical reader is anything but a junk food munching couch potato with a penchant for Mr Price clothing.
Contrast this with mainstream magazines. Today’s publishing buzzwords are “positioning” and “target market”. Women’s magazine editors are particularly adept at this and claim to know exactly who they’re writing for: “Our typical reader is self- assured, financially independent and between the ages of 25 and 37. She drives a BMW 3 series or similar, eats out five times a week, holidays overseas twice a year and goes to gym every day to keep her perfect figure.” Unless, that is, she’s the 40-year-old manic depressive reading last month’s magazine in the doctor’s surgery. Well, you can’t win them all but you certainly wouldn’t attract the advertisers if you admitted that your articles on “Ten Ways to Please Your Man in Bed” were more likely to be read by sexually frustrated, overweight girls in boring jobs who are still paying off the Fiat Uno they bought three years ago.