Adv' mc magazine
 

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?

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?

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.

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 http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/ubb/smile.gif

Yoni

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.

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!

Motorcycle travel magazines
 

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.

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 :lol2: (running for cover...)

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

He said it. I too find it difficult to understand why so many people do not seem able to grasp the most fundamental rule of business: Price is where Supply meets Demand.

If the demand was there for a magazine costing £20 an issue that paid its full-time professional staff writers and photographers £500 a day for Pulitzer and National-Geographic quality work, it would be on Smith's shelves right now. It ain't, so it ain't.
Of course I do. Everyone does. But. How much will this level of quality cost me in a magazine? (Also, you are assuming, incorrectly in my view, that we will never have our minds blown or our eyes excited by things we see on the net). Besides, and this may come as a shock to those who regard themselves as professional (and I'm not picking on you here pharris as I don't know whether I've seen your work or not) "professional" work is often not nearly as good as "professionals" might like to think it is. This is just my opinion of course, but these things are inevitably subjective so opinions are all we have. I often read staff writing in some of the magazines that I think is mediocre. Uninspired and uninspiring. And I see photos which, whilst technically good (no great plaudit these days when anyone with a few hundred quid can buy himself a camera that will almost guarantee good technical results) depict full-time staffers drinking sponsors' beer, or sitting on beaches grinning. No doubt their mothers like to see such images of their handsome sons. I don't. I have no time for their vanity.

I am not opposed to people putting pictures of themselves in their blogs of course. Blogs take a lot of time to put together, and it is only right that their authors personalise them to reinforce their happy memories of their trip. But the blog author isn't paid. If I'm paying for something, I will not tolerate family snaps of magazine staffers on glorified holiday. Show me the bikes and the places. Not the faces. (Ouch).

Valid and important point. (Though perhaps in a different way from what you as a professional intended). And why I, along with thousands of others, now spend more time reading internet blogs than we do reading magazines. There's still a place for magazines though. For one thing, reading from paper is still nicer than reading from a screen. For another, you often have to plough through a lot of relatively dull stuff on the net to find the good stuff. This is where the opportunity lies for magazines. If they are to survive against the net, they will only do so if their editors do what their job title suggests: Edit: (Seek out and) Select the good stuff. Pay as little as possible for it. Tidy it up. Polish it. Print it.

If on the other hand magazines continue to pay themselves to go on expensive jaunts that most of us have to save up for they will eventually bankrupt themselves. Motorcycle magazine staff writers and photographers have had a good life. But like it or not (and I suspect not), they need to face twenty-first century reality: It's coming to an end. You are being steadily and inexorably replaced by "amateurs".

I am amazed by how blind people will be when they don't want to see the writing on the wall.

PS: pharris: It may not sound like it from my comments above but...Welcome to the HUBB.

MSL didn't chase me much when my subs lapsed a few months ago. When I cancelled my TWO subscription a couple of years ago however, I had someone ring me up offering me 12 months subscription for £12. I've never in my life bought anything from a cold-caller, but I bit his hand off. Of course, as TWO hoped, I was lazy and let my subscription contine after the £1/issue period was up...

An ex-gf used to work for Future Publishing in Bath. They had (and almost certainly still have) a small but very profitable team that syndicated their magazines to foreign countries. Foreign publishers would be sent each magazine digitally, and would then translate/re-write/cut/add as they saw fit, rustle up some local advertising to replace British bike shops and hey presto they were in business as a low-overhead magazine publisher in Outerstania.

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.