Folks,
We at Paizo are reading this thread with great interest, and are very interested in coming up with some kind of solution that pleases the greatest number of people. Despite Johnny's comment regarding waiting until Gen Con to get feedback, Dungeon Editor Chris Thomasson and I are reading this thread every day, and undoubtedly some of the things said here will work their way into our thinking for the magazine's immediate future.
So don't worry about Paizo catering only to the "convention elite," or whatever the charge was back on page 3. Johnny's a publisher, and has all sorts of publisher tasks to keep him busy until the summer. Chris and I are the ones who make the magazine happen, and we're definitely listening.
Well, ok, I admit that I'm no longer listening to posts that start "flush Polyhedron down the toilet" or "I hate the worthless Polyhedron," but I'm sure Chris has got those posts covered, and I'd like to think I've absorbed the gist of those opinions.
In the interest of keeping this thread as constructive as possible, I'd like to mention a number of things that people may or may not know, to give you some idea of the limitations we're under and what we can do to make sure that both Dungeon and Polyhedron survive for a long time to come.
1) "Make it black and white!" This is _not_ going to happen, as much as it would please many of our readers. We understand why some of you would prefer uncoated paper (for easy margin scribbling) and black and white maps (for easy copying). But it's not going to happen for two reasons. Color interiors make for greater newsstand "lift," which is to say color gets us more impulse buys at the newsstand--buys that we need in order for the magazine to be successful. Also, as someone noted earlier in this thread, advertisers won't give the time of day to a black and white magazine. But why do we want ads in our magazine? Isn't that part of the problem, you say?
2) "Lower ad pages." I get a sense, from reading this thread, that some of you look at ad pages as an intrusion on your gaming "product," and that the magazine would be better off without them. While I agree with you from an asthetic point of view, Dungeon/Polyhedron (like nearly all magazines) _needs_ ads to survive. Generally, the fewer ads a magazine has, the less healthy it is. Take a look at InStyle or Maxim. Those magazines are LOADED with ads (and much more lucrative ads than the likes we get), and actually have fewer content pages than ad pages. That's actually quite standard in the magazine industry.
Now, I'm not saying that we want the magazines to be so dominated by ads that the ads choke out the content, but we would be very happy with more ads in the magazine, because it would mean the company (and hence the magazines we publish) are healthy and strong. When that happens, we can pay our writers and artists better, can get more staffers to produce more pages, etc., etc., etc. Our current assumption accounts for about 15 pages of ads per issue. If we get more than that, we often will add pages to the magazine, so those pages don't often crowd out "content," so to speak.
3) "Put Poly on the Web!" While the Internet is a great tool, it's not yet a viable publishing venue for a magazine of our type. This is not going to happen. If Poly gets pulled from Dungeon, it will be to give it its own magazine or to kill it.
Lastly, it's been said numerous times, but it must be said again. The reason WotC merged Dungeon and Polyhedron was that _neither_ magazine was particularly healthy, and our publisher (Johnny Wilson) believed that by combining the magazines, both together would appeal to a wider audience than either alone. So "killing" Poly or Dungeon isn't a great answer, because we'd be cutting loose a big audience either way. The magazines' numbers improved when we combined them, and got better when we raised the price to $7.99 a few months ago.
Paizo's managment decided to speed up the magazine's production in order to bring in a more constant flow of revenue. In the bizarre world of magazine distrubution, it's better to be a monthly than a bimonthly publisher, because it's easier to cover distribution costs with the former than with the latter.
From my personal point of view, it appears as though the move to a monthly magazine may have been a mistake, especially when the Poly content outpaces the Dungeon content and especially when the Dungeon side only has one adventure. I'm not yet sure how we go about "fixing" the problem to make long-time Dungeon readers content without utterly shafting Polyhedron fans (and make no mistake, suggestions that Poly becomes a 10-page section or a web enhancement do exactly that), but it's something that'll occupy a large amount of our time over the next few months.
It's my hope that we have some kind of solution by Gen Con, when Johnny throws the question to the audience. Monitoring this thread is a great way to get suggestions that might get us closer to our goal, so I'd like to thank everyone who has posted constructive advice here. We're definitely listening, and we'll be listening in the weeks and months to come.
Thanks,
Erik
