Have you ever checked out MRH?

[wm3798]

Hey Joe, welcome to the thunderdome.  As a two time published N Scale Magazine writer, I have to say that while I really like the format and direction of MRH, the pay scale you offer is hardly competitive.  To publish the same article I just ran in N Scale, MRH would have paid about 1/3 what I got from Pam.  And Kirk Reddie pays a little bit more than she does.   As you well know, putting together a well crafted article is no small feat, and the promise of a little extra money for the train budget makes it worth the effort.  But at the rates I saw published for MRH (this was about 6 months to a year ago that I looked) it's just not worth the effort.

I would think that with the intensive advertising and the absence of an expensive printing and distribution system, you could be a little more competitive.

Just my two nickels...

Lee

[chuck geiger]

Lee good question, what are publication rates for small articles to
build a layout and documenting the process?

[DocGeoff]

I love MRN. I have been on board since the beginning and it gets better every issue.

[lashedup]

Hey Joe, welcome to the thunderdome.  As a two time published N Scale Magazine writer, I have to say that while I really like the format and direction of MRH, the pay scale you offer is hardly competitive.  To publish the same article I just ran in N Scale, MRH would have paid about 1/3 what I got from Pam.  And Kirk Reddie pays a little bit more than she does.   As you well know, putting together a well crafted article is no small feat, and the promise of a little extra money for the train budget makes it worth the effort.  But at the rates I saw published for MRH (this was about 6 months to a year ago that I looked) it's just not worth the effort.

I would think that with the intensive advertising and the absence of an expensive printing and distribution system, you could be a little more competitive.

Just my two nickels...

Lee

Not so much to defend Joe, but typically Internet advertising just isn't as lucrative as print advertising. To get an Internet publication off the ground you have to fund it up front. You can't get advertisers to pay for something with zero audience, so you have to offer free or nearly free advertising till you can build some credible traffic. During that period, you're funding it out of pocket and it is a true labor of love. It usually takes a year or more before you can realistically start to make any kind of money and Model Railroading isn't exactly the hottest Internet business to make money in.

I'm guessing Joe's biggest expensive is travel and show coverage. If you think about airfare for a minimum of two people (or more), hotel rooms, meals and more it adds up to a lot. We've all seen the bitching in these forums when someone doesn't produce a show report, so you'd have to figure show coverage is important and you need to be thorough and do it well. Throw in production expenses, countless hours spent in production time, illustrations, video and more and it rapidly turns into a very large undertaking that shows no signs of making meaningful money for a while. Throw in Internet forums like this one where there are TONS of tips, suggestions and how-to's and it becomes even more difficult to compete.

I've been toying around with an online n-scale magazine for years now, but the time commitment involved for such a niche market really means it is something that would be done as a labor of love and any money you make would be put right back into travel budgets, hosting budgets, software upgrades, camera and video equipment, computers and on and on and on.

Just trying to shed some light on why Joe probably can't pay as much as some magazines that have been around a long time.

- j

[wm3798]

I understand that, Jason, but at the end of the day, the commodity is the content.  If my work is valued at X by one customer, what is the motivation for me to supply it to a customer that only wants to pay .3X?  If the publisher is willing to invest in show coverage or other expensive information gathering, shouldn't he also be willing to pay a competitive price for content that he doesn't have to do much of anything to, other than select the final photos (even if they're the wrong ones... >) and run the copy through a spell check?

The writers and the quality of the content should be the first priority of any publication, as that establishes the reason for the audience to show up at all.  If I'm an advertiser, I'm going to want to be associated with a quality publication, because that's what's going to attract the audience I want to visit my business.

It's the old adage "You have to spend money to make money"...

Lee

[AlkemScaleModels]

The per page rate might be less with MRH, but you usually get more pages. So it may be closer to a wash. Same was true with RMJ when it was around.

The other advantage of writing for MRH is that your layout gets more exposure, as N Scale and NSR have limited readership. Sometimes exposure is better than the fee, as most of us aren't doing MR articles to pay the mortgage.

Joe close your eyes.... You can also submit to MR/GMR/MRP as they are always hurting for N Scale.  The reason the C&O Mtn Sub module article was in GMR this year was that they had NO N Scale submissions. They had to ask me to come up with something.

[wm3798]

That's BS.  I submitted the Sweet Spot article to GMR last fall, and was told by Herr Sperandeo himself that the photography wasn't up to their standard yada yada.  That's when I sent it to Pam.  The only thing she asked me to re-shoot was the cover, because it was getting a weird color caste due to the gimping I did for the steam effect.

[John]

Personally, I find all this getting published stuff to be over rated. After all these years, there aren't too many new ways of doing a lot of the things we do in MR, and there is plenty online for free ..  so, while some of you care about getting some shekels to help pay for your hobby, the content of the magazines has left me wanting for something more exciting than they are providing.

[sirenwerks]

Not so much to defend Joe, but typically Internet advertising just isn't as lucrative as print advertising. To get an Internet publication off the ground you have to fund it up front. You can't get advertisers to pay for something with zero audience, so you have to offer free or nearly free advertising till you can build some credible traffic. During that period, you're funding it out of pocket and it is a true labor of love. It usually takes a year or more before you can realistically start to make any kind of money and Model Railroading isn't exactly the hottest Internet business to make money in.

Yea? That's what starting a business entails. You either do it for the love or for the money, either way it involves financial risk. No reason for anyone to expect otherwise or to complain about it.

I'm guessing Joe's biggest expensive is travel and show coverage. If you think about airfare for a minimum of two people (or more), hotel rooms, meals and more it adds up to a lot. We've all seen the bitching in these forums when someone doesn't produce a show report, so you'd have to figure show coverage is important and you need to be thorough and do it well. Throw in production expenses, countless hours spent in production time, illustrations, video and more and it rapidly turns into a very large undertaking that shows no signs of making meaningful money for a while. Throw in Internet forums like this one where there are TONS of tips, suggestions and how-to's and it becomes even more difficult to compete.

Don't forget, a majority of this can be written off as business expense. As well, there are ways to get creative with saving money, like getting a local to cover a show to save travel budget.

  ....any money you make would be put right back into travel budgets, hosting budgets, software upgrades, camera and video equipment, computers and on and on and on.

Again, starting a business isn't free and investment is key to developing product quality. However, the mag or site can be slick and glossy as all get out and it won't matter if the content blows chunks. So if paying more for new equipment is worth more than good writing and photos, then someone's more interested in collecting toys than churning out an interesting read that will be around a while.

[jfugate]

Don't know what the N scale mags pay, but we pay a variable rate based on text and photos, not pages per se. We also pay a premium rate for video content or drawings.

Here's our general payment rate:
$10 per page of text (we estimate 2000 characters per page, rather than words which can vary)
$10 per photo.
$25 per minute of finished video.
$100 for a cover.
Regular contributors who are established with us can get an additional 50% bonus on the total payment.

The paper magazines use a per page rate something like $50 to $100 per page. I believe RMC is more like $50 per page, and MR is closer to $100 per page. Let's look at a couple examples to see how our page rate can vary, but I believe it's fairly competitive.

For example, if you look at a one-evening project shortie article (1.5 pages of content) plus 10 photos, the computation goes like this:

3000 characters of text (about 2 pages of text in MS Word) - $15.
10 photos @ $10 each - $100.

Total payment - $115 - divided by 1.5 = $76 per page - quite competitive.

Let's look at a typical feature article - that's say 10 pages of content with maybe 25 photos plus 5 minutes of video. That's:

20,000 characters of text (about 15 pages of text in MS word) - $100.
25 photos @ $10 each - $250.
5 min of video @ $25 per minute: $125.
Feature story gets the cover: $100.

Total payment - $575 - divided by 10 pages in the magazine = $57 per page - competitive with RMC's per page rate.

The long 2 and 3 part in-depth step-by-step articles generally have over 100 photos alone, plus text - which means we're paying circa $1500 each for one of these guys. The largest check I've written for an article was just under $2 grand - and the modeler spent about 3 weeks putting the article together. How many hobbies will pay you that kind of money for a few weeks work with a camera and the computer word processor?

One last comment on articles - most submissions that get rejected are because the photography is not up to snuff. We have editors who can make your prose sound good - what we can't do is fix poor photos - photoshop is good, but it won't turn crappy photos into beautiful ones.

The Victor Roseman cover story in the current issue is an example of how much difference really good photos make. I think that article's one of the best looking model railroading articles I've seen anywhere (no bias, of course) - and it's Victor's photos that made it that way. With the digital medium we are able to make the photos big and detailed - with this article running 19 pages in all. Had Victor submitted this article to MR or RMC, it would have been 7 or 8 pages with tiny photos.

--Joe Fugate
   Publisher, Model Railroad Hobbyist

[DKS]

Personally, I find all this getting published stuff to be over rated. After all these years, there aren't too many new ways of doing a lot of the things we do in MR, and there is plenty online for free ..  so, while some of you care about getting some shekels to help pay for your hobby, the content of the magazines has left me wanting for something more exciting than they are providing.

I don't agree. I think there will always be a potential for new subject material. Technology is always changing, so there are often new ways of doing old things. New products are constantly arriving, so there's fodder for mods/kitbashing/etc. Software changes the way ops are handled. Plus there are trends in track planning that change with people's attitudes and preferences. Thirty years ago, staging yards were rare beasts; now they're ubiquitous. And finally, what floats your boat may not be what does the same for someone else.

N scale I think suffers not for a dearth of material so much as a surfeit of publishing vehicles. We have two scale-specific mags to siphon content away from the big mags. Plus now there's a steadily growing crop of electronic mags, of which MRH is an example, further diluting the pool. Some really good modelers are not technology-savvy, so rather than making things easier for them to publish, it's making things harder; they may have been OK with a film camera and a typewriter, but they don't have a digital cam, they're computer-phobes, PDF and DPI are Greek, and they may not even be online.

Some modelers underestimate the effort needed to get an article to print. Even with a completely 100% digital process, there's still a lot of work involved generating good content, espeically for how-tos, which take a lot of careful planning. Or, some folks may be like me, having had bad experiences getting published (screwy, biased publishers, ham-handed idiot editors), and are leery of the process. I finally went to self-publishing online. These days there are so may ways of getting content to people (like the Railwire!) that it probably leaves some modelers feeling like deer in the headlights.

You can slice and dice the fees paid for content any way you like, and it may matter for a few modelers, but what ultimately counts is how a potential contributor feels about the process and, in particular, the people involved. That's if you can get them motiviated to contribute in the first place; in some ways, it's like trying to convince people to vote.

[jfugate]

As to more well-known modelers who generally aren't "online" ... Allen McClelland, Bruce Chubb, Chuck Hitchcock ...

But then there's also those in that same age group that are all over the computer thing: Jack Burgess and Don Mitchell come to mind. And they both now have iPads and read MRH (and are writing for MRH) - so you never know.

We get modelers at shows we talk to who get all excited when they find out we're free - but then ask "what's a download?" when we tell them how to read us. That's one reason we now also have the online readable version - no download necessary. Just "click" and you're reading the magazine just like that in your web browser.

US Congressional Census Statistics puts the general US population at about 80% online at this point - where "online" is defined as get on the internet at least once a week to read email.

--Joe Fugate
   Publisher, Model Railroad Hobbyist

[John]

Damn you David .. made me learn a new word today (surfeit)     --- good counter argument ..


Joe - no matter what - I hope your enterprise flourishes .. I like the online medium .. and I don't have to worry about the post office delivering it down the street

[DKS]

US Congressional Census Statistics puts the general US population at about 80% online at this point - where "online" is defined as get on the internet at least once a week to read email.

Nice stat, Joe, but what proportion of modelers are online? FWIW, NMRA once said only half of their membership is.

More to the point, what proportion are computer-savvy? I know some fellows who can read their email (so long as they can use AOL), but they're hopeless when it comes to using a simple word processor, and downloading an image from their camera is like asking them to land on the moon.

I'm not putting down electronic delivery; it's just not the end-all be-all solution to the world's problems that some people might try to convince us it is. A little trouble with the grid, or a DNS goes south, and all of that data living in the cloud is offline. Look at the panic that ensues every time the A-board goes down--they come here to moan about it.

[sirenwerks]

I don't know, aside from DCC and sound, new tech doesn't get much airplay.

I'm still waiting for a decent primer on fiber optics, with some interesting application beyond just 'points of light'. Certainly structure lighting is still in the dark ages, despite products and a few fine examples being available from the likes of Ngineering (their N scale loading dock mock-up still blows me away for some reason).

I remember some time ago an article by Pelle Soeborg on high-tech scratchbuilding in MRR. The concept was neat, but the practical application was too advanced for most. And no one's really taken that and run, except for the dearth of laser cut manufacturers, the bulk of which don't really stand up in terms of quality, IMO, or offer much that's personally interesting in the way of structures. No one's making it easier for average modelers to make their own models, you still have to know CAD.

However, I am excited by the amount of DIY etching and casting that's hitting the ground. In that vein, I think it would be an appropriate venue if MRH created and article (and I have no idea on who could write it, certainly not me) on the manufacturing process - an expose that revealed the secrets. Like how to develop masters, professional mold types and uses, the whole out-sourcing (wrong word) process, etc. It could either a) spawn a new gen of small manufacturers or b) provide some understanding and respect for the manufacturers that do give us product.

Bryan