Battlegrip Magazine: What Happened?
I launched Battlegrip Magazine on September 4 — posted here — and then promptly found myself a little frustrated and discouraged at the limited response. Those who did provide feedback — thank you for your comments, tweets, emails, and phone calls! — seemed quite happy, but as near as I can determine fewer than 20% of the daily visitors to battlegrip.com downloaded and read the magazine.
As I said, that was a bit discouraging. And as I started assembling the October issue life got in the way and I just didn’t have it inside me to care enough to devote the hours to making the magazine happen. I know that sounds defeatist and pitiful, but it’s honest and I have since been trying to figure out what my next step should be with both the site and the magazine idea.
I Need Your Help
And that’s where you guys come in. I ran a poll last month to check interest in the magazine (look at the sidebar to the right) and the results only drove home just how small a percentage of readers even had interest in the magazine format. And after the hacking problems over the summer I’m still unsure of the safest and best way to produce new reviews and feature material.
If anyone has suggestions on how someone with limited time and no real web skills can produce content without being forced to suffer through hacking problems I’d love to hear ideas. Because right now I’m leaning toward an approach that may or may not be popular; but it would make me happy and guarantee that what I generate is not lost. But I want to hear from you guys before I put any more thought into my own ideas.
NOTE: I really do miss writing toy reviews and feature articles. I find that sort of writing and photography relaxing and fun. I just don’t find the act of dealing with webhosts fun, and I was so discouraged at the limited response to the magazine — relative to site visits — that I haven’t pushed myself on the magazine. I apologize to all of you who did download and provide feedback on the magazine. I’ve let you down by not getting a second issue completed and online.
Related articles
- BattleGrip Magazine Poll Results (battlegrip.com)
- September Review Round-Up (Sept 1st-15th) 107 Links! (itsalltrue.net)
- Kickstart the Transforming Expectations Toy Reference Book by BattleGrip’s Philip Reed (actionfigurepics.com)
Turn it into a G+ community. Been working well for us and Fate generally. Allows for others to contribute, which might further drive interest.
I’ve never really used G+ enough to do anything with it. BUT that means I should be taking a closer look.
Turn it into a G+ community. Been working well for us and Fate generally. Allows for others to contribute, which might further drive interest.
If I’m being honest, I think online magazines (via PDF) are just not going to work in general. It’s one thing to be have a magazine or newspaper or comic book that you subscribe to on your phone or tablet and that is optimized for viewing on that format, and it’s another thing to be an actual paper magazine, but I think a PDF tends to bring together the worst of both worlds – it tends not to look very good on tablets, it’s way too small on phones and difficult to read because you have to keep resizing everything, and if you read it on your PC you don’t have the pleasure of flipping through the pages.
I don’t know, man – maybe you should do a Kickstarter for an actual paper issue and try that quarterly, or maybe get in touch with Brian of Cool & Collected and see if you and he can work together on the magazine he’s got the Kickstarter going on for. As for keeping this website going without having to worry about hackers, I sent you an email about a possible solution to that that we can discuss online.
I will say, please don’t switch to Facebook or Google Plus – I never visit sites that are situated on them. Even PGPoA’s own Facebook page is basically just an RSS feed.
I keep thinking the best thing for me to do when it comes to toys is books. Nice, color, hardcover books that focus on a single subject. Not every subject will have enough demand to be worth the effort, but as long as I can find enough interest to cover printing/shipping costs on a subject that interests me then I think things will work.
The Kenner book will prove to be a very good experiment once I dive deep into that and launch the project.
Could keep it a free pdf download but have it hosted at a site like DriveThruComics.com. Since it’s free, I don’t think there would be any legal issues. The downside is people would have to register for that site to download it. The upside is that it’s on a secure server.
I’m avoiding any site where people have to register to download files. I know I have more passwords/registered accounts than I know what to do with.
I agree with Poe on two points:
First, although the PDF magazine is a cool idea, the format is a bit too limited compared to a blog for my tastes. A blog makes it easy to find similar articles, expand images, and search for content, all of which are difficult in the PDF format.
You did a great job on that first issue, though. I loved the colorful design, and it would be cool as a printed magazine. As I was reading it, I wished that web pages could look as cool.
I also agree with Poe that there are limitations to the Facebook and Google+ idea. Although it’s undeniably easy to publish content, you can’t format it at all. Not only that, you can’t categorize it to make finding old content easy. I considered moving the Dork Dimension to Google+, but eventually decided that it wouldn’t be a good fit.
Another option is to beef up your security. You might want to change your password to something that’s more secure. Also, WordPress has two-step verification that might help you secure your account better:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/security/two-step-authentication/
But the problem might be how BattleGrip is hosted and how you publish content. For example, if you publish with FTP, you might be inadvertently exposing your account credentials. Third-party widgets can be security problems, too. It all depends.
Regardless, it’s always a good idea to completely back up your site every once in a while. I don’t think any solution is completely hack-proof, so it’s better to be safe than sorry.
I’ve stopped using FTP and will start looking for a better host. Dreamhost has been nothing but a headache.
Thanks for the magazine kindness! I do appreciate how many of you downloaded and enjoyed it. The emotional ROI was just far lower than I expected.
You know, if you want to write about toys, but not have the hassle of running the site – I’m certain there’s many sites out there that would love to have you on their staff…or even do guest stints. I know one off the top of my head 😉
I do like the idea of guest posting at other sites. I should reach out and try to seriously make that happen.
If the security/maintaining of the website is what’s dragging on you, perhaps find someone knowledgeable & trusted to handle that aspect of Battlegrip for you, leaving you to do the fun part of writing, reviewing & taking pictures.
We had a big problem with site maintenance and security for a large WordPress site we run. We switched from a typical hosting account to a “WordPress host” and haven’t had a problem since. They take care of the security aspect, which was our biggest problem. We went with Websynthesis, but I hear WP Engine is just as good.
I’ll look into both of those. Thank you!