Okay I kind of randomly dropped half of this into the Retro Cars thread and it has prompted a few questions heading my way in various places, so I figured I'd put together what I'm thinking currently on the magazine thing and also float the idea of the club thing here, with a bit of explanation. I'll probably do a video in the next week or so with what RR plans are for the next 6-12 months and where we're at with show stuff too, so you may get a bit of repeat information from this thread in that.
Retro Rides Magazine
This idea has been floating around for nearly ten years, at one point I nearly ended up jointly purchasing Retro Cars magazine with Bryn, before it sold to Unity. If I'd have been a bit more personally financially stable at the time I definitely would have done. Then over the past ten or so years there have been a number of magazine proposals and ideas I've worked up with various people, I've consulted on a few tiles too. However the retro market was being serviced (to differing degrees of success) by Retro Cars magazine and there is no point in re-inventing the wheel. Then they decided to not be a retro car magazine and I find myself getting emails from publishers asking if I'd be interested in doing Retro Rides magazine to fill that hole in the market.
I already had a plan for what I'd do with RR magazine, and it didn't fit with the standard model of monthly publications, however Matti who publishes Street Machine has helped me anyway, put me in contact with print suppliers and helped work out costings for both print as well as how to average the other costs for production (photography and copy I already knew the prices for having done that stuff in the past myself).
What would RR magazine actually be? My aim is for a quarterly magazine, about 200 pages (although probably first issue will be a bit more modest), cover price of £10, quality print. High quality photography which is given the room to breathe, think of standard event coverage being 12 pages, rather than 4 or 6, think of car features being up to 16 pages. It wouldn't just be pretty pictures though, 2000+ word features being the norm. Content wise it would be what you'd expect, modified older cars, event coverage (with everything from race meetings, to retro car events, to tentpole "big" events like FOS), garage life, as well as hopefully readers other mods. What we won't have: buyers guides, tech/how tos, news, readers rides because all those things are serviced by this here forum more than adequately.
Sounds good when can I buy it? Here is the thing, right now this is a set of ideas, a sketched out flat plan, a costed production sheet and the starts of an InDesign document. To turn it into a reality, or at least the reality in my head I need to raise about £10k. In the modern world the best way to both sanity check an idea and raise money for creative endeavour is still Kickstarter. Originally I planned to maybe have issue 1 available at Gathering, but I've learned from previous experience not to pile things on top of each other, so I plan to launch the Kickstarter at or around Gathering, with the aim of having the first issue out in time for Christmas
So there you go that is the magazine
but what about this club thing??
Club Retro Rides
I've mentioned to a few people over the last year or so my desire to make the Retro Rides Gathering a two day event, with a proper competitive hillcimb on the Saturday, then the actual show on the Sunday. In order to do this I need to get Retro Rides MSA registered, when I was looking through the paper work it seemed it needed to have some kind of more official club like structure (this may or may not be the case, but it was how I read the document). This got me thinking, what would Club Retro Rides look like? Could it be a thing that was more than just a way to get through the MSA. All sorts of ideas started popping up, store discount, pre-release on show tickets, exclusive events?, definitely membership stickers. Then as I've been working on the forum (and there is a massive update coming this year (probably !)), it made me think that there was mileage in improved image management etc. for club members (due to the cost of hosting that), maybe other member discounts for products (we've been approached before about offering stuff to a more limited subset of members).
Are you going to do it? At the moment I don't know. I've got the capacity to do it, but I don't know if there is the desire there for it. It has been something that has been raised a few times over the history of RR. It would be a great way to support he forums spiraling hosting costs as well as offer an easier way to organise the social side of RR, show attendance etc. I'd pitch it about £20 for a year, so hopefully a few hundred folk would want to get on board with that, support what we do as well as get a bunch of (as yet vaguely defined) member benefits.
So yeah ... that is what is going on right now...
Retro Rides Magazine
This idea has been floating around for nearly ten years, at one point I nearly ended up jointly purchasing Retro Cars magazine with Bryn, before it sold to Unity. If I'd have been a bit more personally financially stable at the time I definitely would have done. Then over the past ten or so years there have been a number of magazine proposals and ideas I've worked up with various people, I've consulted on a few tiles too. However the retro market was being serviced (to differing degrees of success) by Retro Cars magazine and there is no point in re-inventing the wheel. Then they decided to not be a retro car magazine and I find myself getting emails from publishers asking if I'd be interested in doing Retro Rides magazine to fill that hole in the market.
I already had a plan for what I'd do with RR magazine, and it didn't fit with the standard model of monthly publications, however Matti who publishes Street Machine has helped me anyway, put me in contact with print suppliers and helped work out costings for both print as well as how to average the other costs for production (photography and copy I already knew the prices for having done that stuff in the past myself).
What would RR magazine actually be? My aim is for a quarterly magazine, about 200 pages (although probably first issue will be a bit more modest), cover price of £10, quality print. High quality photography which is given the room to breathe, think of standard event coverage being 12 pages, rather than 4 or 6, think of car features being up to 16 pages. It wouldn't just be pretty pictures though, 2000+ word features being the norm. Content wise it would be what you'd expect, modified older cars, event coverage (with everything from race meetings, to retro car events, to tentpole "big" events like FOS), garage life, as well as hopefully readers other mods. What we won't have: buyers guides, tech/how tos, news, readers rides because all those things are serviced by this here forum more than adequately.
Sounds good when can I buy it? Here is the thing, right now this is a set of ideas, a sketched out flat plan, a costed production sheet and the starts of an InDesign document. To turn it into a reality, or at least the reality in my head I need to raise about £10k. In the modern world the best way to both sanity check an idea and raise money for creative endeavour is still Kickstarter. Originally I planned to maybe have issue 1 available at Gathering, but I've learned from previous experience not to pile things on top of each other, so I plan to launch the Kickstarter at or around Gathering, with the aim of having the first issue out in time for Christmas
So there you go that is the magazine
but what about this club thing??
Club Retro Rides
I've mentioned to a few people over the last year or so my desire to make the Retro Rides Gathering a two day event, with a proper competitive hillcimb on the Saturday, then the actual show on the Sunday. In order to do this I need to get Retro Rides MSA registered, when I was looking through the paper work it seemed it needed to have some kind of more official club like structure (this may or may not be the case, but it was how I read the document). This got me thinking, what would Club Retro Rides look like? Could it be a thing that was more than just a way to get through the MSA. All sorts of ideas started popping up, store discount, pre-release on show tickets, exclusive events?, definitely membership stickers. Then as I've been working on the forum (and there is a massive update coming this year (probably !)), it made me think that there was mileage in improved image management etc. for club members (due to the cost of hosting that), maybe other member discounts for products (we've been approached before about offering stuff to a more limited subset of members).
Are you going to do it? At the moment I don't know. I've got the capacity to do it, but I don't know if there is the desire there for it. It has been something that has been raised a few times over the history of RR. It would be a great way to support he forums spiraling hosting costs as well as offer an easier way to organise the social side of RR, show attendance etc. I'd pitch it about £20 for a year, so hopefully a few hundred folk would want to get on board with that, support what we do as well as get a bunch of (as yet vaguely defined) member benefits.
So yeah ... that is what is going on right now...