A small dose of freedom ideas goes a long way
Getting back to my July 7 post, “One of the secrets of BHM.” It is important for any of you aspiring publishers out there to understand that you don’t really need to know how to write well to publish a successful magazine. My good friend, Dave Belanger, publisher of Countryside and Small Stock Journal, is not a writer, yet he is a far more successful publisher than I am. He took over Countryside from his father, Jd Belanger, a writer like me, but neither Jd nor I possessed that gift of business sense and management that a Dave Belanger has. For Dave, the writing and editing are secondary to the actual business part of the magazine business.
I approach the magazine business from a different viewpoint than businessmen like Dave. I want to change the world to my view of how it should be. That’s why I delve unabashedly into politics, with both John Silveira and I ticking off a good percentage of the readership on occasion with our one-page commentaries at the font and back of each issue. To me, magazine publishing is not just a business, but a passionate, and needed, undertaking to make the world a better place, which to me means making people more free of government and more reliant on themselves. BHM, to me, is really a magazine about freedom.
A magazine like The Mother Earth News also includes politics, but they hopped aboard that popular, safe environmental bandwagon that half the world is riding. Many of their articles have a “green” slant: Save the planet, stop global warming, etc. I think most environmental politics is pure bunk and opportunism, but it’s a good movement to hitch your sled to if you want a lot of subscribers. I know Bryan Welch, the publisher of TMEN, a little bit and I think he’s doing a pretty good job with Mother, much better than the previous couple of publishers did with it. Like Dave, he’s a very good business manager.
If I didn’t have Lenie backing me up on the business end, I’d probably stress BHM to its financial limits with my insistence on freedom (spell that political) articles. But I can’t help it. Once I stop publishing commentaries about freedom, Libertarian politics, destructive Big Government, self-serving politicians, phony environmental scams, and the like, I might as well get out of the business because I won’t be interested in publishing anymore.
But there is an upside to tackling political topics in a how-to magazine, at least if you write about them with a lot of thought. Silveira and I approach our topics carefully, writing with logic and moment. We make people think deeply, and despite how ticked off some of them get, they cannot justifiable accuse us of being just political hacks (like many mainstream newspaper columnists) with a political agenda to push. That makes BHM a magazine of some note, in part because we are the only magazine on the planet that dares mix Libertarian and relatively conservative politics with family type how-to topics. BHM is read for its political content almost as much as it is read for its how-to articles, and that says a lot for a magazine that devotes only two pages of each of its 100-page issues to commentary.
It also says a great deal about how to persuade more people that freedom itself is a worthwhile goal. We don’t push politics into the faces of readers. We give them plenty of other useful articles to read. If they want, they can even skip over the two pages of politics, and the magazine is still the best how-to self-reliant read out there. Maybe it’s this small dose of politics we inject into BHM–well thought out and well written, and limited to a small portion of the whole magazine–that makes John’s and my commentaries more digestible to many people. The commentaries themselves typically support the idea of self-reliance, which is the theme that underlies most of the how-to articles. Since being more self-reliant grants an individual more freedom, it is a pretty good combination of how-to articles and commentaries.
In the Feedback section of the Backwoods Home Magazine website is a letter from a reader, Ken Young, that also speaks to this point. It was posted July 9.
