At work with
Steve Watson, Stack
Steven Watson is a fixture of the indie mag scene, his Stack Magazines club posting a different publication every month to thousands of readers around the world. He also organises events, gives talks and runs a podcast.
Launched 18 years ago, the club is a brilliant discovery machine; readers get to enjoy surprise magazines, while the magazine publishers benefit from the reduced unit cost of a higher print run.
This week, Steve’s hosting ‘Reading Magazines,’ a day of talks inspired by a viewing of The Gentleman’s Magazine, the first publication to adopt the word ‘magazine,’ almost 300 years ago ‘When I started reading it I realised that it feels remarkably fresh and alive,‘ he explains, ‘It has a lovely, conversational, gossipy tone, and I could feel its connection to the magazines that I’ve loved reading for so long.’
The day will open with a look back at the history of magazines, before looking forward at what the future of magazines holds. Steve explains more as he discusses the origins of his magazine club and offers advice on launching magazines.
What are you doing this Monday morning?
I was at the London Design Festival launch last night, so I’m not having a massively productive start to the week. I’ve taken my youngest to school, cleared some emails, and next I think I’ll edit a podcast, because I can close my eyes for some of it.
Describe your work environment.
I work from home, and the view from my desk looks out across the rooftops of Kilburn and Northwest London. I used to be on my own up here most days, but at the start of the year we adopted Forest, our rescue dog, and now he doesn’t leave my side all day. (Literally—as I write this he’s asleep with his head somehow wedged under the legs of my office chair.) And earlier this summer my wife left her job in the NHS to work full-time on her social enterprise, so now I have a proper home office with colleagues and everything.
Which magazine do you first remember?
I remember reading Smash Hits, but the first ones I loved were video game magazines. I read Amiga Format, which usually came with a free demo disk on the cover, and I got totally obsessed with all the news about new releases, and reviews, and the gossipy insider stuff. I read Total! and other Nintendo magazines too, and they had the same appeal, creating this cool, funny club that you felt like you could be part of. (At least it seemed cool to a teenage boy growing up in Hull.)
What’s your favourite magazine?
Argh—this is impossible! I honestly don’t have a favourite magazine, but at the moment I’m really enjoying Elastic. The writing is excellent, the design is clever and playful, and they’re subtly subverting the rules of magazine making to induce a sort of psychedelic reading experience. It’s so good.
What other piece of media would you recommend?
We just finished watching Task and it’s great. Mark Ruffalo is a rumpled alcoholic detective who is tasked with finding a gang that’s robbing drug dealers. It’s trashy in all the best ways, with brilliant pacing that reveals a new twist each episode. It was released on HBO last year but I missed it at the time. I just happened to hear a friend talking about it, otherwise I’d never have come across it. It blows my mind that there are so many great TV shows out there (and bands, and books, and magazines) but they get buried by rubbish so it’s almost impossible to find them.
Describe Stack in three words
Surprise magazine delivery
How do you select the magazines for the subscription service?
The main thing our subscribers want is to be surprised, so I try to vary the subject matter each time. For example, we just sent out a food magazine this month, so we won’t send another food magazine for a year or so. Of course there are some basic standards we need in terms of the quality of editorial, design and production, but the thing I’m really looking for is an idea. I love it when I see a magazine that is either communicating a new idea, or a familiar idea in a new or unexpected way.
Over the last few months we’ve delivered Found You (emerging Canadian literature and arts), The Fence (funny, clever, London insiders), and Pencil Magazine (made entirely in pencil!), and that gives a pretty good idea of the breadth of what we do. Lots of our subscribers are designers, and lots work in magazines themselves, but mainly it’s just people who want to read something they wouldn’t have picked up themselves. The aim is that a Stack subscription should never get predictable or boring, because it’s a new and inspiring magazine every time.
You’ve been running Stack for 18 years now; how have indie magazines changed over the period?
If I think back to what the popular idea of an independent magazine was in our early days, it was probably quite big and heavy, with thick paper and lots of white space; something like Cereal or Kinfolk. I don’t see as many magazines like that these days, and I think there has been a general move towards making smaller, lighter magazines with more densely packed pages. That’s probably partly to do with the fact that paper costs so much more now—white space is expensive! It could also be related to a greater environmental awareness—I think more magazine makers are interested in minimising the ecological impact of making and transporting their magazines.
And it’s probably also to do with taste—at some point lots of white space and beautiful photography started to feel like a bit of a cliché. But of course the beauty of independents is that everybody is off doing their own thing, making something that fits the world as they see it, and that’s what keeps it all so fresh and interesting.
What inspired this week’s ’Reading Magazines‘ event?
At the end of 2023 I went to the National Art Library at London’s V&A Museum and requested a copy of The Gentleman’s Magazine—the first printed thing that ever called itself a magazine. It was first published in January 1731 and it’s an incredibly ancient object, you have to lay it on a big, grey cushion so you don’t damage its spine when you open it. But when I started reading I realised that it feels remarkably fresh and alive. It has a lovely, conversational, gossipy tone, and I could feel its connection to the magazines that I’ve loved reading for so long.
This is the UK’s National Year of Reading, and it seems to me that magazines are a great way of encouraging people to read more, because they have lots of things to help draw readers in. There are pictures, headlines, stand-firsts, pull quotes, and all the other devices we’re used to seeing on the magazine page. I got interested in the developments that led from that first magazine, with its simple two columns of text, to the publications that are being made today, and ‘Reading Magazines’ will explore that process of evolution.
The morning is given over to the historical part, and the afternoon is dedicated to the magazines being made today, and I hope we’ll see some threads and themes emerging throughout the day, showing how and why this thing the magazine is still capturing people’s imaginations in the 21st century. The day is for anyone who works in magazines, and anyone who’s interested in changing forms of media, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what sort of people will come along and join us.
Highlight one speaker who sums up your ambitions for ‘Reading Magazines.’
I’ll go with Scott King. I asked him because of course he did amazing work in the late 1990s with i-D and in the early 2000s with Sleazenation, and I want to hear him speaking about that era of magazine publishing. But he’s also making great publications now, like The Debrist Manifesto and The New Space, and I want to hear how the commercial work he was doing 20-odd years ago influences the more arts-based work he’s making now. Also, I saw him speak at a magCulture Live, London years ago and he’s really funny—I still think back to that talk.
What has publishing taught you that may be helpful to anybody else planning to make their own magazine?
Earlier this year I launched a thing called ‘The Mortar’ and it was a humbling experience! It was basically a newsletter, but each email contained just one story, supplied by an independent publisher. We ran it for six months and we shared some really excellent stories, but it just didn’t take off. The people who liked it really liked it, but we didn’t manage to push beyond our existing audience and it wasn’t sustainable, so in June I decided to close it. That whole project was full of lessons, but I’ll limit myself to five…
1. Distribution is crucial—you can have the best stories in the world, but they’re no good if readers can’t find them.
2. Literally nobody in the world is looking for a new newsletter. Especially one that wants you to pay for it.
3. Reading in print is vastly different to reading on a screen, particularly for longer-form stories. Digital is great for speed and cost, but you can do so much more with a story on a printed magazine page.
4. This should be obvious, but starting a new brand is hard! I really underestimated how much work it would take just getting people to understand what ‘The Mortar’ was.
5. Stack has lasted for 18 years, largely because of just turning up and not stopping, and there’s a lot to be said for determination. But you also need to recognise when something is not working and you’re not going to be able to turn things around. When the time came, ending ‘The Mortar’ felt like a big relief, and it’s allowed me to get on with other stuff like ‘Reading Magazines.’
What are you most looking forward to this coming week?
‘Reading Magazines!’ We’ve got a brilliant line up of speakers and I’m really looking forward to spending the day with them and our attendees. And especially the bit where we go down to the pub on Friday evening, hopefully to celebrate a successful event.