Stayin’ Alive
This is boring news but… we changed our business model. I want to explain why and, who knows, maybe some of you will be interested in this behind-the-scenes glimpse into an Escapological business practice.
In the old days of the magazine (Issues 1-13), we used a print-on-demand service to satisfy every single sale. Well, the first fifty or seventy copies were delivered to my flat and I’d personally ship those ones to subscribers. But after that, an order would come in for a single issue and I’d essentially forward that order to the printing service.
The main advantage of fulfilling orders this way was that I didn’t need to hold inventory. I was very mobile at the time, flitting between Glasgow and Montreal and also travelling a lot, so boxes of magazine stock would have been quite the encumbrance.
The main disadvantage, however, was that it didn’t make any money. The profit margin on a £6 issue was maybe £1.50. So if I sold, say, 200 copies, I’d “make” £300. This would usually go towards printing the next batch of subscriber copies. We always said “New Escapologist makes no money” and it was true.
This time around, I want to make a small amount of money from the magazine. For myself, that is, not for a company or anything. It’s very, very hard to make money from books or magazines and the effort I put into it all is stupendous. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it all, but I need about £6,000 of income a year to stay alive and it makes sense for that money to come from my bookish exertions and not from some stupid day job that would take time away from the core operation of book- and magazine-making.
So that’s my aim. To make the £6,000 (from New Escapologist and from my books) I need to stay alive. What a grubby little Capitalist I am, eh? In between my self-financed meals, I will be rolling in pence.
As such, the old print-on-demand model is no good. I need to print hundreds of copies in advance so that the cost-per-copy is about £2 and then sell them at £9 for a £7 profit. It might actually work, though of course it remains to be seen.
I expect to sell 300 copies of each issue. 300x£7 is £2,100. Twice per year is £4,200. The remaining £1,800 (and hopefully a little more) will come from sales of my books.
So there we go. That’s why we changed the business model (or maybe just the “printing model”) and why, eventually, issues from 14 onwards will eventually go out of print. Just like other magazines.
I don’t think I’ve ever spoken so candidly about money and how that works here at Escape Towers. But I wanted to be transparent for a moment, to show you where the money goes, to show you how it all works. I don’t get rich, I make just enough to live on. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. Anything other than subsistence farming is, in my view, a waste of time.
Frugality and minimalism make things viable (and ethical) on the outgoings front, while these sort of exertions (writing, editing, printing, schlepping to the Post Office every couple of days) take care of the income. The rest of life involves recumbent positions.
Thanks to everyone who has supported New Escapologist‘s return and therefore my ability to carry on doing this. Here’s where to go if you’d like to subscribe or buy a single issue. There’s maybe 100 copies left!
Books! Old and New! (But Mostly New)
I used a Saturday morning (and Saturday afternoon) hangover to set up a Bookshop.org page for New Escapologist.
It’s basically a curated list of book reccomendations where, if you buy anything from it, 10% of the sale comes to New Escapologist and another 10% goes to help indie bookshops. Assuming this all actually works, it’s a good idea.
Many of the books from the Missing Bibliography are on it, as well as some books mentioned here in the blog recently. There are some great ones from the Verso antiwork list as well.
It’s not perfect. Many of the books I read and recommend here at the blog are “old” and seem not to be available on Bookshop.org. And when I say “old,” some are less than ten years old and were always perfectly mainstream, so shopping on Bookshop.org is hardly a deep dive. Worst of all, almost none of my own admittedly niche books are available there, with the honorable exception I’m Out.
In any event, I managed to build a strong list of reccomended titles (covering our usual pet subjects of, for example, minimalism, Bohemia, small business, walking and travel, etc) that I can certainly add to.
Let me know of any woeful omissions you’d like to see added, dear reader, and which list you’d like to see it added to.
Moreover, if someone is in the mood to buy a book, please go ahead so we can see if this thing works.
The Good Life for Wage Slaves is sadly not available there (I’m not sure why: it’s registered with Ingram and Neilson, the big book databases) but it can still be bought, as ever, direct from the publisher with 100% of the takings now coming to us.
“That’s a Nice Idea”: Wringham Responds to Your Comments
We’re running a survey to help shape the new run of the magazine. It’s open until the end of January. If you didn’t know about it already, you’re probably getting our emails, so be sure to join the mailing list for a cheerful monthly newsletter.
At the end of the questionnaire, there’s a space for general comments. And you’ve all been so nice! There have been some questions and constructive suggestions in there, for which I remain grateful. Since the survey is anonymous, I can’t respond to anyone individually so I’ve collated my responses here. It’ll serve as a sneak peek into what the returning print mag will be like too.
I fucking love New Escapologist!
Thank you, mother.
I arrived too late to be part of the initial magazine party, one way to raise funds I think would be offer a digital (probably easier) or physical full back catalogue at a discount.
Nobody is too late! The original 13 issues were written to withstand the tests of time, precisely so new people could read them forever. Doubtless they’ve aged a bit in the five to fifteen years since they were published but not in the usual way of magazines. Think of it as patina. You can buy Issues 1-7 at discount here (or here for PDF editions) and Issues 8-13 here (here for PDF).
There needs to be more women/different/better gender balance for me. For example, your list of authors [in one of the survey questions] is nearly all men. I do enjoy your writing but a print magazine needs to reflect the readership. If it’s for men, that’s fine, but I wouldn’t be reading it so much.
Quite right. I don’t want the magazine to be yet another boys’ club. As well as being morally bleak, it would be aesthetically dull. In real life I’m quite sensitive to this sort of thing and I seek pluralism in my reading. This will be reflected in the mag.
The author list you mention was a sausage fest but the object of the question was to capture people’s preferences for writing style (e.g. Orwell being straight and clean, Le Guin being vibrant and radical, Sedaris being a living humorist, Ferriss being self-helpy). That the authors best suited to serve as reference points were almost exclusively male* is indeed a shitty thing, a consequence of decades of male privilege. I vow not to prop up that culture in the mag. I have two female columnists in mind and a particular non-white female author for the first issue’s interview. These aren’t diversity hires either, they’re people whose work I love. Perhaps even more importantly, editorial (the voice of the mag) will never assume the reader is male. That’s a promise.
(*Le Guin was the only woman on the list; she was almost the most popular option as well, just 1% of the vote share behind winner Orwell).
Here are three separate comments concerning a digital edition:
If you go with print copy, please also consider a PDF version. Shipping can be more expensive than the item depending on where in the world it is going.
So, the reason I would love a digital edition is for accessibility reasons. My vision is alright now, but when your magazine was originally coming out, I was blind and PDFs are generally inaccessible. Digital will also help with worldwide readership (eg. India, Nigeria, maybe even South Korea?!).
I am a fan of Substack. Have you considered this as an option?
I hereby promise a digital edition. Almost certainly PDF and probably also an epub. I will probably avoid Kindle altogether: I’m no fan of Amaz*n and there was clear (and commendable) pushback in the survey.
A paid tier Substack might be a good solution for a digital edition too, but I worry about the content being mediated by an admittedly very good and seemingly less-evil-than-usual social media company; I’ll look into it more sincerely.
I do love it when our stuff travels far into the world and I have always tried to be inclusive with cultural references for that reason. Shipping costs are of course a barrier so this is a strong argument for a digital edition. As a point of fact though, I have already “broken” South Korea with Escape Everything! in translation!
Mastodon
Probably not. Then again I’m always about five years late to these things.
I already retired at 50, so I’m interested in living the lifestyle vs preparing to escape
Enjooooy yourself, while you’re still in the pink. Congrats! The balance of escape tactics to good life material will be baked into the cake.
I would love to subscribe to a magazine even abroad (I’m in Germany) and would also bring it to our local meeting group of minimalists and escapologists of all sorts for discussions.
Thank you. I wonder now if there’s a way for me to encourage this sort of socialising? Then again, people will always self-organise.
If published twice per year, I would love the issues to come out at the brink of holiday seasons, e.g in late June and in mid-December. This kind of reading suits the holidays well.
That’s a nice thought and probably conducive to the magazine being read rather than merely purchased. For my own creative satisfaction, I’d like to get Issue One (or 14, I haven’t yet chosen a numbering scheme) out earlier than June. I was thinking April and October for a schedule. That’s a fairly arbitrary decision though and those months are admittedly quite busy in the world of work because of the shape of the financial year. I’ll give it some thought. Maybe 2023 can be April and December but then June/December in future years.
As far as content goes, I just love the magazine although I definitely agree with some of your recent blog posts that a more “timely” magazine would feel like a cool counterpoint to the timelessness of the original run. Let’s say 50:50 timely to timeless ratio? It’d be cool to have a mix of the blog-style content and the timeless guest essays in the magazine.
That’s a good idea and I’ll probably run with it. I don’t want to lose the in-depth essay style we had in the original run, but I do want more magazine-style items this time around like letters and columns. I won’t allow such frivolity to take over though, so 50/50 might be a healthy balance.
Include news and stories of escape, idling, FIRE etc. from outside the UK and North America (by preference from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and South America)!
I can confirm today that there will be a quite special idling column. Escape is an important theme and I’d like to be more firmly anchored to it than we were in the past: less mission creep. That Emily Dickinson quote is my touchstone. And FIRE really is essential, isn’t it? I have ideas about that. As to more internationalism, yes please. I’ll see what I can do.
I wonder if it would be good to send escapologists a few free copies to leave in libraries, doctors’ waiting rooms etc? I think it’s important to preach not only to the converted…
Yes and no. I do see the importance of spreading certain messages, such as those of minimalism or the “you don’t have to do what you’re told” revelation. On the other hand, I’ve been quite careful to develop a receptive audience so that I don’t have to expose myself to the draining and unproductive attitude of trolls. It’s amazing how violently some people can react to, for example, the light suggestion that they curb their consumer privileges. Intelligent and gentle people use libraries though, so maybe that would be safe.
Page 3 featuring Wringham
Is that you, dear? If not: excellent.
Will you be using TeX / ConTeXt for the typesetting? I’d like to read / publish an article by you about your use of ConTeXt for our Dutch NTG journal.
I know you! Alas, we will not be using TeX this time around. I’ll be cheaply imitating the style of the old magazine to an extent though. This is partly due to my own temporal and technical limitations: I enjoyed using TeX in the original run but it was done in close collaboration with a particular friend who is not on board anymore (we’re still great friends, he just doesn’t want to typeset the mag this time).
Thrilled that NE is coming back. Regarding YouTube and podcast etc, be wary of spreading yourself too thinly. You have limited resources and should not feel the need to obey the whims of the baying crowd to go multi-channel. The old magazine was a perfect distillation of intelligence and irreverence. If you can capture that again, with a contemporary edge, you’ll have done your readers a great service. Good luck!
You’re right, of course. For now I do not think we’ll be branching out into YouTube or podcasts. I did receive an offer of editing assistance from a wonderful reader who also happens to be a professional video editor though, so at least one barrier has been lifted were I to do something for YouTube. This said, YouTube was the least popular format discussed in the survey: it wasn’t unpopular but the readership prefers blogs and podcasts. If we ever venture into audio or video formats, it’ll be in our second year. The limited resources you mention will be focused on delivering two issues of the print mag in 2023.
Can we send you articles for consideration?
Maybe send ideas before articles. I don’t want people to write 2,000 words that I have to spike. Prompted by your question, I have updated the contributor guidelines.
Call your mother.
Leave me alone, mummy. I’m playing with my friends.
Just found out after years you still exist even though I’ve been on the email list
Yes, that was a Mailchimp problem. Readers reported that the newsletter was going to their spam. Thanks to the recent move to Substack, more people seem to be receiving, reading and clicking. Phew. Welcome back.
*
Thanks everyone. If you didn’t complete the survey, you still can. If you just want to make one comment or suggestion instead, you can do it (less anonymously) by email or beneath this post.
If you’d like to support the work of bringing the magazine back to life, please buy The Good Life for Wage Slaves (for which I now get 100% of the money) and, of course, send caffeine.
An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 69. 2022 Review.
Here we are again, thank goodness. Another annual report to my imaginary shareholders.
The year found me feeling far happier than in recent years. 2020‘s lockdowns, 2021‘s covid problems and house move, years of catching up after the visa struggle are all behind us now and I find myself on the other side of a recovery process. I felt extremely creative this year and hungry for action. Next year, all being well, will be even more gorgeous.
Here goes. Read the rest of this entry »
Don’t Wait for the Rug to be Pulled When You Can Throw in the Towel
The Guardian has a good feature for International Workers Day (1st May).
It uses fictional workplaces from the past twenty years, from The Office to Severance, to show how working culture has changed:
For all its mundanity, The Office never went full-blown bleak (one colleague might ask you, “Will there ever be a boy born who can swim faster than a shark?” but another might turn out to be the love of your life).
But such hope and humanity may be absent from the next wave of pop-culture workplaces. Gruelling gig-economy jobs, timed loo breaks, enforced commutes after months of working from home, rising bills, closing companies, the looming threat of redundancy – the desperations of 21st-century capitalism have been neatly reflected in Korean dramas such as Squid Game and Parasite, and it’s unlikely the depictions will end there. There’s brutality at the heart of the new workplace drama, as there often is at the modern workplace itself.
The evolution of the fictional workplace is a reflection, of course, of the evolution of real-life workplace anxieties. They now have a different flavour to when New Escapologist emerged in 2007.
Where it used to be a relatively simple “I’m bored and trapped here, being juiced for money” it’s now the same plus a fear that the world outside the workplace is too scary to escape into while that world also threatens to reach into your safe space and drag you out into it, unprepared, like something from The Mist.
“There’s a feeling captured in 90s and 2000s pre-crash media, that sense that you were bored and stuck at work,” says Amelia Horgan, a philosophy PhD student at the University of Essex and author of an examination of modern employment, Lost in Work, “whereas the dominant feeling now is the fear that the rug will be pulled out from under your feet without you realising, very quickly.”
New Escapologist was one of those “pre-crash media” but I think The Good Life for Wage Slaves (2021) was a timely update. The Good Life has a more contemporary take on workplace anxieties — this “fear of the rug being pulled out from under your feet” — through both my misery memoir segments and through my new-and-improved solutions.
The new fear of “the rug being pulled” is connected to bigger machines than before, to bigger and more disruptive world events. In my case it was the hostile environment for immigrants. In your case it might be the pandemic or the war or the results of austerity or something else, but it’s all connected to a broader social environment that is sometimes difficult to read much less do anything about.
The issues have indeed evolved and become more complicated, more surreal-feeling, more of a headache, taking us all the way from David Brent to Squid Game, but the solution, I think, remains the same. Escape.
Times have changed but I’m still here to say “don’t wait for the rug to be pulled when you can throw in the towel.” You don’t have to submit to either type of workplace anxiety, be it of the 2007 variety or the 2022 variety. You can escape instead.
Build an escape fund, hone your skills, define your goals, embrace frugality, practice minimalism, and get the hell out of it. Because face it: that green Squid Game tracksuit wouldn’t suit you.
An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 62. Hole.
Escape Towers is on the top floor of a very old building, and water drips into our spare room whenever there’s serious rain. We reported the problem to the landlord some time ago, but no repairs were forthcoming. Since it was only our spare room and wasn’t a constant problem, we didn’t put any pressure on him to get it fixed. Bohemia!
Read the rest of this entry »
Wit
I’d been thinking about the expression “to live on one’s wits” and its connection to “being witty.”
Here, I talk about living freely and ethically and tactically. There, I tell humorously-intended stories. Is there an overlap contained in the word “wit”?
Just as I was having these thoughts, clever old friend Unclef gave me a book called Wit’s End: what wit is, how it works, and why we need it by James Geary. It’s a good book. Playful, brief and smart.
Its most important contribution to solving my wit-based question is the phrase “improvisational thinking.” That’s it! That is what connects ha-ha wit with living on one’s wits. Both are direct expressions of improvisational thinking.
But this paragraph explains it neatly too:
forms of wit other than the pun [can be] understood as compressed detective stories. I’m thinking in particular of people who “live by their wits,” as the saying goes. Inventors, scientists,and innovators of all kinds, people skilled in improvising fixes, finding clever escapes from tight scrapes, or making unlikely discoveries under seemingly inauspicious conditions.
Finding clever escapes from tight scrapes, by jove. Geary goes on to tell the stories of some of those scientists and inventors by way of illustration, but it’s also what Escapologists do every single day just by going about our general business. Improvisational thinking is at once the alternative to the rat race and the swiss army lock pick (if there could ever be such a thing) required to escape it.
It’s what they don’t teach you in school because they can’t teach it in school even if they wanted to. It’s a mindset that needs to be cultivated through unusual experience and by thinking constantly about the world and its mechanisms: “Why isn’t X like so? Can Y function better upside-down? Can I live this way instead of that way? Do I need as much money to do Z as they tell me?”
It’s the essence of an Escapological mindset or outlook. Things like minimalism, finding clever backdoor ways of doing exactly what you want to do (rather than what other people think you should do), and “building muscles of resistance” (see Escape Everything!) by not watching television are all ways of using or honing one’s improvisational thinking, one’s wits.
I’m happy to report that I say this in relation to minimalism in The Good Life for Wage Slaves so this isn’t a total epiphany, but I wish I’d made a little more of it because it’s so important.
I think I knew it all along: have I not said many times that our practice is “Escapology” because it comes with a sense of humour and theatrical aplomb? But the Wit’s End book really homes in on that truth.
Another useful point concerning the Escapological mindset (which comes from the same chapter of Geary’s book) is:
Now, you might wonder whether this type of wit is innate–you either have it or you don’t–or whether it might not in some form be nurtured and cultivated. Well, it turns out there is a way to hone the powers of attention and observation needed for serendipitous discovery: live in a foreign country.
He means that, abroad, everything is different and a certain “cognitive flexibility” is required (and is developed) at all times. It keeps you on your toes, which is useful. So live abroad! Or do the sort of things that might have similar effect on your brain to living abroad: walk through streets that you don’t need to walk through, read a different sort of book, write one, talk to different sorts of people, learn another language.
Cognitive flexibility and improvisational thinking, kids. It’s what’s for dinner.
Reduce! Reduce! And Again I Say Reduce!
This article is a timely reminder that minimalism is the only answer to the climate crisis.
Telling people what they can throw out and recycle is important, but corporations and governments who are in the business of growth do not want to address the real problem: the vast and escalating quantity of plastic and other stuff that people buy, use a bit and then throw away. Along with celebrities, “influencers” and PR companies they seek to create needs for things we never knew we wanted, and then manipulate us to buy more of everything. Bombarded by advertisements, we are then persuaded that the more we binge-shop, the more fulfilling and satisfying our lives will be.
As I say in Escape Everything!, the materials required to create almost any physical item, ultimately, come out of the ground. Recycling and reuse are respectful of this fact, but they are no alternative to leaving the coal in the ground and the rainforest intact.
The way to avoid ecological disaster is to starve the beast of consumerism, by buying less and reusing more of everything. … we must change consumer habits and attitudes to consumption.
Minimalism is the change in consumer habits/attitude to consumption we’ve been looking for. For reasons that still elude me, minimalism is often considered a sign of affluence despite costing nothing (and in fact saving money). So why not pursue that sign of affluence instead of the costly plastic ones? This way, you can still enjoy a sort of social status-in-relation-to-consumerism while helping to save the planet in the only meaningful way. And if social/consumer status is not important to you, then follow minimalism anyway for all the other benefits.
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Should I Buy a Record Player?
Should I buy a record player? I’d genuinely like some advice on this, whether from vinyl enthusiasts or from get-a-grip friends. So leave a comment below or drop me an email.
Whenever I betray my anti-consumerist, minimalist ethics by joining in with some craze or other, I usually regret it. Joining Twitter for example was a mistake that has cost much fretting and fiddling that I could have done without.
Buying a record player would be the physically-biggest move I’ve made away from minimalism in years, currently owning absolutely no physical media. After a few months or years of buying records, it would likely be the most expensive too, and it would also represent a significant bump in energy usage here at Escape Towers.
On the other hand, it would be nice to correct a certain lack of music in our lives. Yes, we can currently play music from YouTube or Spotify (and I digitised my 300-strong CD collection before selling it a decade ago, so it still lives on in the cloud). But this involves a dependency on Silicon Valley and the infernal jab-screen, which is something I’d like do less of, and it’s not much fun to stab at an app when what you want from music is human connection.
Moreover, I’m sometimes a little (though not a lot) embarrassed to invite friends to Escape Towers when we offer little here but quiet retreat. A record player, would offer a bit more event to an invitation. “We’ll play some records,” I’ll say and “bring a couple of records over.” Selecting music would become a social activity and friends won’t have to watch me fumble with an app, playing autocratically-selected music, and trying to remember if I have a certain Stereolab album because I can’t see the whole collection and the search function isn’t working properly.
I like the idea of browsing the records in Monorail (fun local spot steeped in history) on a Saturday morning with Samara and of hanging out with Friend J who works in a second-hand vinyl shop with more reason to my being there than just to stare at his face. But is this not precisely the sort of positive lifestyle situation dreamed up by any product-hungry consumer?
Having set off my own vigilance-against-consumerism alarm, I at least think this could all be done fairly cheaply and with a non-rampant consumerist credo if we just buy our equipment and the bulk of our records second-hand and never from Amazon. Of course, this could just be a sort of internal green-washing on my part to justify what would actually be quite a silly purchase.
Any strong feelings? Would this thing (and that’s what it is: a thing) enhance life or would it just be another infernal regret and a loss of personal integrity?
