For a long time now, I’ve considered starting an indie fashion magazine. This is because the fashion magazine I want to read doesn’t actually exist.

And really, it would be more than a fashion magazine. It would be a style magazine.

I don’t want to read propaganda. I don’t want to read something that will tell me what to wear or think or watch or read or buy. I want a magazine that will get me to think, that will offer depth, the “why” of things.

At first, I thought this magazine could be a stripped-down, low-fi affair. No stylists, no photoshop, just real women. Darling magazine is already doing that.

Yet while I’m 100% happy that Darling is doing their thing, it’s not the magazine that I crave. It’s polished and clean, and based out of LA. I’m looking for something darker, willing to dig for things, more like a carpet of leaves on a forest floor.

No to succulents, yes to ferns and mushrooms.

Back then, even when I imagined this magazine, I couldn’t conceptualize how one would go about running or financing such an endeavor. Now that I’ve been sniffing around the indie publishing scene for a while, I have a better idea of how that would work.

And of course, the timing of this blog post is brought to you by synchronicity in the simulation: a random retweet of a 2015 article on indie fashion magazines on Business of Fashion.

Many indies still rely on traditional advertising, which is a good reminder that often fashion people just want things to look prettier—not be all that different.

The most obvious revenue stream available to titles is the cover price of the magazine. “It has been my number one rule here that we never ever sold a magazine at a loss,” said Masoud Golsorkhi, founder and editor-in-chief of Tank magazine, an innovatively-designed, ideas-focused, independent fashion title. “If we couldn’t rely on copy revenue, I would just close shop immediately,” he continued.

This model could be facilitated for niche publications by crowdsourcing websites like Kickstarter and Indie-go-go. It’s working for sci-fi journals—why couldn’t it work for another genre?

Other magazines capitalize on the publisher-as-retailer format (the exact opposite of content marketing, I suppose):

A number of independent publications, including Inventory and Kinfolk, a quarterly magazine based in Portland that celebrates the ‘slow lifestyle’ and features contemporary illustrations, charming photography and intimate interviews with creatives, have also been able to leverage their brand and point of view as curators of products, tapping transactional revenue by setting up online and brick and mortar stores.

Really it’s the same endgame as content marketing, just starting from a different side. A really high-end merch store. The more I think about it, the more that the publisher-retailer dualism seems to be the most viable way to sustain an operation online. Advertisers are fickle, platforms like YouTube are fickle, and right now even payment providers are fickle (see also: PayPal deplatforming InfoWars), but an group of people who support your cause—those people can’t be bought.

Other funding models seem to follow standard ways to make money online: advertising, consultancies, sponsorships, etc.

Finally, an observation on the increasing rarity of printed magazines:

“Paper is a luxury material and I think that consuming our magazine is a luxurious experience. It is very different from the way that you engage with online content,” said Martin, who said that working in print builds a different, more desirable relationship with readers than online. “It extends to things like the quality of the photography and the production and the way it is graphically designed — it’s a very time-consuming operation, which extends to the way we want to engage with our readers.”

There is something to be said for this—the luxuriousness—but also the exclusivity. It’s how Ben Settle runs his copywriting empire. The best stuff is in the hard-copy-only format.

I have too many ideas for projects at all times, but this one makes me hmmmmmmmm a little bit hmm-er.