Hi riders
UK's "Bike" magazine latest edition has a special Adventure motorcycling section. (Grant, liked your words)
Is there a magazine dadicatet to the subject alone?

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Dare!
My ride from Dead horse to Ushuaia 2009 is at
www.harpatka.com
It's in hebrew but lots of pics and some translation

Yoni

Hi

i usally buy MSL (motorcycle sport and Leisure) has a lot on the touring and equipment/bikes involved

Used to be one called adventure motorcycling but it went under bout a year back. not enough mainstream readers i guess?

Missed that one. But maybe I wasn't so much into "ADV" riding then. I occasionally bought the now-defunct Motorcycle Voyager though. Shame it failed. Even if the ride reports and photos varied widely in quality.

Given the boom in interest in Britain following Ewen and Charlie's jaunts, you'd think there would now be an adequate market for "Adventure Motorcycling" here. But I don't see any publishers rushing in.

A book with the same title was published recently. I received it as a birthday present and I'm very pleased with it. Okay, in doesn't go into huge detail so old hands will have little to learn, but the photography is good and book as a whole highly inspirational for riders and would-be riders. I won't say wannabees. Serious riders are IMO better off with the Adventure Motorcycling Handbook. But there's a lot to be said for nice big full-colour pictures.

I subscribed to Road Runner for a while. Still would if I lived in America. But it was too focused on its home country for this Englishman, interested in riding to less developed countries.

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Seek Truth

15 countries in 40 days. Tanks, crashes, minefields and Kalashnikovs

What with TWO's offer for adventure stories posted elsewhere on the site, and with bike's latest feature maybe the UK's motorcycle magazine editors are finally starting to realise that there is a fair proportion of bikers that don't really care if the new R1 will shave 1 second off of their laptime or not!

I would'nt hold your breath on that. I Contributed articles to Motorcycle Voyager together with a photographer and they went bankrupt owing a lot of money to everyone. Following that debacle the photographer put a lot of effort into launching a motorcycle travel publication, and had a magazine publisher very interested, but the economics were just not feasible. For a starter, motorcycle travel is expensive. To produce engaging travel articles with high quality photography means that the people involved need to be paid. It is too costly.

Magazines choose/prefer to go with the sometimes talented amateur who they can pay GBP150 rather than people who do it for a living, and they get away with it because, you, the reader continue to settle for sub-standard text and photo quality. Why would you buy a magazine when you can read the talented amateur online? Surely you want to read something that blows you away and see photos that really excite you? That is what professional journalists and photographers are paid to do.

Here we go again. It's our fault for "settling for sub-standard text and photo quality" so that the poor professional writers can't earn a living...read your first sentence above--"IT IS TOO COSTLY" for these magazines to pay professional writers.

The economics are not there. The magazines cannot pay what professional writers so richly deserve; whining about it doesn't change that fact, so get over it and let's move on.

Road Runner Motorcycle Crusing & Touring.
http://www.rrmotorcycling.com/
In the August 2005 issue the have an article about Horizons Unlimited and another one on South Africa.
Both by Ramona Eichhorn and Uwe Krauss

One magazine I've come across with an 'adventure motorcycling' bias is the American Dual Sport News. Interesting tech articles, bike tests and product reviews. It also has some travel reports, which do have a bias towards the Americas, but then it's a US mag. IMHO well worth the subscription fee. Subscription's available to readers outside the US.

Tourenfahrer is the best out there but it's only in German.

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My photos: www.possu.smugmug.com

Steve
I wonder if Tourenfahrer know that there are 70 times more english readers than german...Today every small fashion magazine is translated monthly to 6 languages

Yoni

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Dare!
My ride from Dead horse to Ushuaia 2009 is at
www.harpatka.com
It's in hebrew but lots of pics and some translation

Yoni

Cheers for that, will have a look. I used to get GlobeBusters Sport and Leisure, but became bored very quickly.

As a former subscriber to MS&L I'm getting bombarded with special offers to rejoin at a rate that suggests to me they are worried. They should be to be honest, they won't sell me £100 worth of chip wrapper while it's got VFR's and the usual 600cc sports bike on the cover.

Anyone know how hard it would be to get the German mags translated? Isn't it a case of automated translation, proof reading, correction and printing? I'd give that a chance even if it is all Touratech and BMW's over anything I've seen in the UK. Once it's going I'd guess you could add in UK/US written items until you've got a true sister publication.

Andy

I've gotta think it would be quite a bit of work, and then they have to figure out distribution, etc. (wonder what percentage of moto magazines are bought in newstands vs subscription??). And the advertisers are only paying on the basis of non-English subscribers, at least for now. Maybe they could start with a digital-only English edition, especially if they could find some quality amateur translators to do the translation for free (running for cover...)

And do magazine subscriptions really cost 100 GPB?! That's nuts!

You mean a true published translation? or a rough amateur one? Machine translation's pretty good now, if you shell out for a decent professional version, and translators aren't that expensive (at least I'm not) but for a whole monthly magazine it'd still cost a pretty penny, then you've got all the re-paginating to do (I know when I translate from French to English I inevtibaly end up with fewer words in English, going from German to English the mag would only be half as thick).

It'd be possible, I would guess though that there's two things putting them off, the start up costs of publicity, production and distribution, and the fact that in the UK at least Adventure Motorcycling mags have gone to the wall.

One thing people keep mentioning here is about the cost you pay for a magazine as opposed to the cost of production. Do people honestly think you pay for the magazine? You don't, what pays and what puts the profits in the coffers is advertising revenue and you get that from having a large, loyal readership. No doubt one of the reasons UK mags have gone belly-up is that they couldn't get the advertisers, it's only a small market, so you'll never sell thousands and thousands of magazines, and also the advertisers are either small companies or their adventure bikes make up a tiny proportion of sales.

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