Steve Watson

0:22Good evening thank you very much for coming thanks very much it's nice now for having me here I've been asked to stand just behind this lectern which is making me feel quite head mastery at the moment which is a strange feeling and I'll try not to wander over there too much.

0:38So I always like to start these things with a quick show of hands who here knows what stack is excellent who here subscribes to stack even better this is good you will see there's a discount code that comes at the end of this and you may feel you want to use it okay.

0:59So I run stack which is a magazine subscription service so the idea is that every month I send out a different independent magazine you never know what's coming next but you do know that it's going to be a beautiful intelligent magazine that you probably wouldn't have seen before.

1:16So I mean you can just like sort of take a look at the pilot I took this picture yesterday so that I've been meaning to update this picture for so long but so you can see that kind of I mean I'm sure lots of people recognize eye magazine at the top there's dumbo feather from australia there's intense made up in manchester rap magazine it's an oxford little white lies so they basically month by month you could get something.

1:40That's about film something it's about music something. That's about art and design and people always say to me like okay great so is this kind of like curated around my taste somehow and it's absolutely not because as I sort of like I'll go on to explain later stack doesn't really care what you're interested in status cares about the best I just want to pick the best magazines and send them out to you and at the moment that's something that is getting easier and easier because there's this huge appetite for this type of magazines and there's a huge provision of these kind of magazines so I was told joe told me earlier that apparently this event sold out in 48 hours which is ridiculous to like sell 150 tickets for a print magazine night I mean the everyone keeps saying prince dead it's obviously not the case there's a news night is doing a special program on independent magazines which goes on the 13th of march so put that in your diary so this is just this evidence that there's more and more enthusiasm for these magazines more and more people are getting interested in these magazines and yet there's actually still a ton of problems associated with them.

2:54So we'll go through we've got some good news and some bad news so the good news is this.

2:59So this is a picture of do you read me in berlin and as you can see it's absolutely floor-to-ceiling wall-to-wall beautiful independent magazines every single one of these magazines has been made by somebody who has a burning desire to get their words and ideas and thoughts onto a page and happen into the world. And that's something that I find incredibly exciting this is something that.

3:22So I'm sure you all know jeremy leslie from mad culture in his book that he published last year he talked about this as being a second golden age for magazine publishing and so basically if the first golden age came in sort of like in the 50s and 60s with essentially mad men these this bunch of guys who figured out this new thing called advertising and they needed somewhere to put their adverts and so this whole you know kind of classic age of print magazines grew up to basically carry these adverts and this second golden age is very much been driven by technology so you know when I started making magazines I got into it because it was just the only way that I could get my words out into the world now everybody knows that they could have a tumblr or they can like sort of just be tweeting and get stuff out into the world. There are so many people doing that that people often ask what kind of you know what's the point of making a print magazine these days why why would you do that it's you know it's expensive and messy and difficult and stuff and actually I think rather than putting people off print magazines I think it's sort of like blogging and stuff as being a kind of like a gateway drug into prints so like if if blogging is kind of like smoking weed on a weekend and it doesn't really mess with your life it's all just fun and then you kind of get drawn into this print world and like a year later you've lost all your friends and like the house and stuff because so basically I think that kind of the the actually the profusion of digital channels is actually encouraging more people and to get into making print magazines because they look for somewhere to go after that and of course these days the technology means that the tools are there so you know these days anyone working in their bedroom can use adobe creative cloud for like 35 pounds a month and you're using the same tools as the guys at conde nast you can turn to kickstarter and get the money together for a project.

5:18And this is something that we forget but that you know literally five years ago that just didn't really exist and so what we're seeing all of this is is a direct result of that stuff so this is the good news that's fantastic the bad news is exactly the same every single one of those magazines is in competition with every single other magazine and that's a nightmare if you're a publisher because you're trying to just sort of like get you know you it's been easy than ever to make a magazine but that means loads of people are making magazines so how do you. Actually find your audience it's actually harder than ever I think to find an audience because you're not just competing against every other magazine you're competing against every youtube clip and every bit of music that someone's made in their garage and kind of like put out into the world.

6:04But it's a nightmare if you're a reader as well because you walk into a shop like this and you're confronted with like well however many magazines are there and they'll probably cost about 10 pounds or so and so this is where stack steps in and tries to help so I started stack what was it now seven years ago. And it was a hobby basically it was I just had this idea I was I was writing for these magazines I really loved and I really wanted to kind of well I talked to friends who I knew would love these magazines and they'd never even heard of them before.

6:38So I knew that. There was something going on there. And so I just kind of like you know made this thing because I wanted to have I wanted to make it happen I wanted to get these magazines out into the world.

6:47And then like as the years have gone by I've kind of given a bit more time to stack and a bit less time to other jobs and until last year almost this time last year I went full-time. And in the process of going full time and doing all of that we rebranded and kind of like you know relaunched and everything. And this is at the core of the relaunch so I took this thing that had been kind of a fun hobby and like really had to think about okay why should someone subscribe to stack and make this is like on the subscribe page on the website you scroll down.

7:20And this is sort of like a thing that convinces you so very obvious stuff read more obviously subscribe to stack you get a different magazine every month you'll read more improve your mail so you know kind of no one likes getting bills this is a nice way to kind of get more fun stuff save money so basically a stack subscription is about 550 or six pounds and depending on which one you go for per month and most of these magazines are kind of ten pound plus and stay inspired so that goes out to a lot of kind of agencies and universities and stuff but this is the one that's been really kind of popular with people. And it was accidental so the I've picked on amazon for this because years ago I bought my little sister slovenian family set and I still get emails from amazon to let me know the battery family have got a new car and they don't believe that I'm not interested but I mean so I've picked on amazon but you know kind of I could have picked on google and the fact that when you google something they guess at the sort of things that you might want to to like to hear I could have picked on social media so if I look at my instagram feed you know kind of you would think that everyone in the world is making independent magazines because that's what I sort of go for in my social media so I've kind of narrowed my horizons so we live in this digital world and there's a kind of illusion that everything is our thing is at our fingertips you know our horizons have never been broader when actually what really happens is our horizons get narrowed and so stack exists to throw these things out into our magazines have always been a fantastic way of discovering new stuff you know people talk about the kind of the the spontaneity of magazines and discovering something new with them. So that kind of gives that a boost by sending you magazines that you might not otherwise have picked up at the same time that I I did all the rebranding I had a good think about kind of the way that we present stack and realize that I spent my entire life coming and talking at things like this and blogging and making videos and doing all sorts of stuff convincing people to subscribe to stack you should subscribe to stack it's great you really like it.

9:33And then the first thing they get when they subscribe it's just this like nasty piece of paper kind of saying yep you've subscribed to stack your subscriber number is this.

9:41So we we overhauled all of that and you now get your little letter on a nice piece of letter paper it comes in a nice branded envelope you get a nice little welcome card which I stole from it's nice that founder will hudson because he came and did a talk that I put on and he said they do cards that go with the annual I was like I love that and you get a sticker which I stole from will hudson which he stole from apple and because I mean if apple and it's nice that too the biggest companies in the world send you a free sticker when you buy something.

10:13That's got to be a good idea right. So it's all about kind of making people feel that they're getting a nice experience it's more than the magazines and we do fun stuff like this.

10:22So basically I noticed that when I send magazines out every month people kind of like tweet and instagram pictures of themselves with their magazines and so I started incentivizing it every month I publish like my favorite five and the winner gets a stacked t-shirt the winner this time was was this one because so sidetracked is like an adventure travel magazine and and this woman had like in her caption she's alright she said then she baked these black pudding sausage rolls and trekked off to a forest clearing to eat her lunch and enjoy her copy of sidetrack so I was like oh my god but this kind of this gives me a really exciting kind of insight into people's lives and how they're enjoying these magazines that have been sent out.

11:09And it makes people sort of like realize I'm part of something bigger and part of a community this is something I think that we really need to push with selling magazines independent magazines in general because it's just you know we need every single small independent magazine shop we need them.

11:24But it's not enough I'd like to think we need stack that's not enough we need more ways for getting these fantastic beautiful magazines these kind of products of the 21st century their new media they're they're just print their new media printed on paper they're people putting their ideas down in a very kind of innovative kind of challenging way and yet they hit this wall once they've printed the magazines of now you've got to get them into smith so now you've got to get them somewhere else that's just not good enough and so I think we need more things silly things like this.

12:00But also probably more sensible things and to help us to help publishers of independent magazines and sell more of them. This is something where.

12:08I didn't package the fonts so it's not it doesn't normally look like this.

12:14But this is me on twitter and instagram please follow me that'd be nice and this is the discount code that I mentioned earlier use nicer for 10 off usual prices because that's a bit nicer that's it you