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News, views and opinions about editing and producing an accessible womens history magazine
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Launching HerStoria – fun and frustration!
Posted on March 14th, 2009 2 commentsWhy a women’s history magazine? This was the question always asked about my plans for HerStoria. Some people were bewildered about what women’s history actually was, thinking it just biographies of ‘great women’. Of course, we know that it’s far more than that. Women’s history explores the past from a different angle, going new places and often upending the history that we thought we knew along the way.
I get frustrated with the male bias of top-selling history magazines, with their emphasis on military battles and great men. When I looked to see the lead in current issues of BBC History and History Today, I found that the first was Wellington (with a portrait and mock battle on the cover) and the latter was headlined ‘Hadrian and the Limits of Empire’. These magazines are wonderful history and great for people who want to read that kind of thing. But please, there must be room for one magazine that looks at history from the women’s view???
Trying to get HerStoria available in the shops is frustrating…..
We’ve put our all, financially and emotionally, into launching HerStoria. It has been a steep learning curve, especially investigating how to get the magazine into the shops besides the men’s history mags. I don’t think this is going to happen soon and we’ll be subscription only for a while. WH Smiths and Borders in the UK charge (in some cases) up to thousands of pounds just to grant a magazine shelf space. In addition, they only do business with wholesalers (who only take on mags that are going to sell in high volumes) and wholesalers only deal with distributors, and of course they all want their cut of the cover price……fair enough, just business at work. But in the rush to maximise profits, small publishers with a magazine that differs from tried and tested formats get pushed out —no wonder many magazines look the same today and are full of adverts instead of copy!Oh dear, this blog is turning into a rant ! I’ve missed out how much fun it has been getting HerStoria launched, and how wonderful all the contributors have been, and how much I have learned from them. So many people, too, have been really generous with their time and advice in helping to publicise the magazine, for which I’m immensely grateful. It has also been gratifying how many men are interest in HerStoria. But then, HerStoria is a women’s history magazine, not a women’s magazine ……
2 responses to “Launching HerStoria – fun and frustration!”
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Subscription only is a good start.
I have been ‘let known’ about it because of Girlsown and especially the Ju Gosling article. I should be most interested to see that she covers more than hockey sticks and concentrates especially on the history of girls school stories. Particularly over the last 10 years and more since her PhD thesis ‘Virtual Worlds of Girls’.
I too have flipped through history magazines ‘with more adverts than copy’ – none of them even to do with history, unless you look at them twenty years hence, and you will do that for the information which is contained within them.
It gets difficult to distinguish advertisements from editorial, particularly if one has a limited experience of the media.
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Hannah Rapley March 31st, 2009 at 12:25
Just seen your blog regading the difficulty in getting the magazine into the shops. Have you tried the news from nowhere bookshop on bold st in liverpool? They have a wide range of magazines that don’t seem to b available anywhere else, and I think it is independent so their rates might be reasonable.
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