Bigger spaces, going places
We’ve just been shortlisted for the Shell LiveWire entrepreneurial awards (the UK’s ‘hottest young business competition’), and there’s due to be a big gala in Manchester in May, where we’ll have the chance to win a great prize - so obviously our fingers are well and truly crossed for that.
The brand new issue of Aesthetica magazine (pictured below) has just come out too, and for the first time it’s in full colour, and looks fantastic for it. It’s also the first issue by which we begin distribution with WH Smith, nationwide (as well as in Ireland).
And more good news is that Tesco are interested in having a look at a recent copy, with a potential view to stocking it, which would be absolutely phenomenal. WH Smith has changed our business dramatically – our readership’s up to 20,000 now – which has been really helpful with regards to selling advertising space and securing the features that we need to be a major player in the UK arts scene.
Next Monday is to be a really exciting day, then – I’ve also got an interview with the Senior Commissioning Editor for Film4 (the guy that commissioned The Last King of Scotland), so I’m going down to the Channel 4 studios to have a little look around there, and write an article about them, as they’re 25 years ‘old’ and have expressed real enthusiasm for the ethos of our magazine.
And the reputation of the magazine is growing; in terms of our field, there’s Art Review and there’s Frieze, quite large arts magazines, and our very own Aesthetica is now another player in the arts publishing industry. It’s taken a lot of years to get to this stage, so needless to say, Monday should be a really good day.
Following that, I’ve got an interview with Rankin, a well known photographer (photographs Tony Blair, Brad Pitt and Kate 
Moss among others and shoots covers for Vogue), so I’m interviewing him, which is going to be really interesting (but nerve-racking). I watched an interview with him on the BBC, and thought ‘oh no, he’s quite a major player, very well-known international photographer, and here I am from my arts magazine, with this rare opportunity…’. But it’s really good, so needless to say we’re getting some really fantastic content booked in.
In fact, the biggest change for the magazine is the decision we’ve taken to start producing the magazine bi-monthly (we’re currently quarterly). So we’ll need to hire two new members of staff in July, as we’ll have an increased workload to manage. We’re just so busy at the moment and going bimonthly means a completely different working schedule.
To have a major impact on the arts scene in the country it’s really important to produce the magazine more often, because quarterly magazines tend to get a bit ‘lost’. Though people get really excited the first month it comes out, and in the second month too, by the third month it’s like ‘oh that’s a bit old now’. Changing that schedule will create much more of an impact for the magazine.
We moved to our new premises three and a half months ago and one of the things I’ve noticed is it’s so much easier with extra space in the office. We sent out 3,000 magazines yesterday to subscribers and it was relatively easy, you just merge the labels, press print and out come the labels, but still needless to say, it became so much easier to do something like that actually having space in the office.
You can grow out of a space, and having moved into our much larger premises, you can really see how much it allows you to grow. We can now take on extra employees, and as a result, plan to increase the productivity of the magazine and the business by 100%.
