Strong Words, the independent book review magazine launched by former FHM, Maxim and Rolling Stone editor Ed Needham, closed last month after 65 issues.
It’s eight years since the Brit journalist, who had spent almost two decades as a magazine editor in the UK and US, faced up to the challenge of getting another senior job in a shrinking industry. He decided to go it alone – literally – by launching Strong Words. It’s been a different kind of magazine about books – which he has produced by himself on a budget that we reckoned at the time could have inspired many other independent publishers.
The much-admired (but perpetually unprofitable) magazine was variously described as “the equivalent of that friend who reads everything, has excellent taste, and puts only the good stuff into your hands. It’s a literary mag for people who read for pleasure and appreciate the transportive power of storytelling.”
Every issue had more than 100 enthusiastic book reviews of new releases and backlist titles in every genre – fiction, biography, crime and thrillers, non-fiction, cookbooks, children’s literature and graphic novels – as well as author interviews, profiles and bold, colourful design: “A great new magazine about great new books”.
It truly was a labour of love for Needham who calculated that, for the past eight years, he had been reading the equivalent of War and Peace every week and wrote the equivalent of The Great Gatsby (30,000 words) for every issue of his nine times a year magazine. We were not the only publisher to have commented on the irony that the tech which enabled him to produce an entire magazine on his own is the very stuff that had helped to take audiences away from magazines. Virtually.
Needham was always pretty modest about his self-publishing: “It’s not as if those 30,000 words require the sophistication or structure of a novel – it works to quite a regular format. I just need to set myself a deadline each day. I start every day at 6am. I spend the first couple of hours walking and listening to audiobooks, and finish at about six in the evening.”
In addition to the editor-publisher’s own reviews, Strong Words contained digests from other sources, reminiscent of The Week.
Needham was motivated – apart from the mere need to (try to) earn a living – by what he believed was the under-exposure of books, especially in the UK, and the way that too much literary coverage was written in a very academic way: “I really feel the book industry deserves a lot more exposure. But, as newspapers have shrunk, so books have just got less and less attention.”
He had told Press Gazette soon after launch: “It is a very solitary pursuit. Strong Words is a magazine which I do on my own. I have a designer for two weeks and it works on a sort of six-week cycle, so I produce one issue every six weeks. And, to do that, I obviously read loads of books, and write lots of words, so there’s not really much time for anything else. I work seven days a week”
Strong Words was a magazine many of us liked and plenty of the writers of bestselling books reviewed by it said so effusively. Graydon Carter, Tina Brown, and Stephen Fry were among them. His readership peaked at just under 1,000 subscriptions.
Needham reflects on Strong Words with pride not sadness: “It certainly struck a chord with people. When it closed, I got a lot of emails from subscribers who were genuinely disappointed. It had introduced them to authors that they would never have tried and to books they would never have heard of. And it enabled them to expand their reading way beyond what they would have expected, because people only buy a few books each year and they tend to stick with what they like. So, I know that – as an editorial idea – it worked. That was what it set out to achieve but it just never quite got there as a business. But, reflecting on it now, it also made me think: when did a new magazine brand last succeed?”
Having spent recent months being helped by friends and former publishing colleagues to prepare a business plan for prospective investors, Needham is cheerful enough about having tried hard to make something work and now feels (at least slightly) relieved “a little bit like a man who’s been released from prison.”
His list of lessons learned includes the conviction that he would have done better having a business partner, preferably with the sales and marketing skills that the whole project lacked throughout. Equally, he should have gone digital sooner. It’s easy to understand why he wanted Strong Words to be a printed magazine about largely printed books. But the absence of any kind of digital strategy for most of its life was also an obvious mistake.
Needham’s is a forever story of a fine journalistic project brought to life, arguably, without a business model or even a business objective. If it had been otherwise, he might have literally cut his losses earlier – rather than just when he was breaking even (yes) on his £35k of annual operating costs. But those costs never included any kind of salary for the creator himself. He has funded his publication from capital made from his role as a co-founder and minority shareholder of a sport and betting information service. It had been sold to William Hill for £13mn a decade ago.
Ed Needham has clearly enjoyed his eight years producing Strong Words. But he must also know that he might once have been able to turn the magazine’s famous fans (and book publishers too) into small-stake shareholders who could have secured its future, even without profitability. We won’t presume to understand the motivation of the longtime investors in, say, Tyler Brûlé’s 20-year-old idiosyncratic Monocle magazine. But perhaps they (like founder Brûlé himself) love their involvement with an admired independent media company now spanning not just the beloved print but also digital, audio and events. It may be an unusual business model but it’s a business model, nonetheless.
If you’re in lifestyle print or digital media, you might just wade through the 65 issues of Strong Words (still available online, for now). Savour the journalism and the style, and consider that the hugely creative and dedicated Ed Needham is ready to resume his career as a salaried editor and journalist. What are you waiting for?
