The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete.  Sandstein  07:01, 6 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Writers Notes Magazine

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Writers Notes Magazine (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)
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A defunct and perhaps cripplingly obscure magazine. Being defunct doesn't matter; being cripplingly obscure does.

At first an article (created in 2006 by User:Egress13) on an obscure periodical, until around this stage (10 Jan 2010) this was short, clear, inoffensive, but utterly unreferenced (and thus perhaps largely untrue). Within six days User:DGG and I had sourced a few uninteresting facts about it from its own website, resulting in this version. None of the various claims for notability within the article could be sourced. As nothing notable about the magazine could be sourced and it seemed to be one part of a rather complex literary/business scheme run by a writer named Christopher Klim (article created by User:Egress13), I suggested at Talk:Christopher Klim that its content, and that of Klim's Eric Hoffer Award (article created by User:Egress13), should be merged into the Klim article. As you'll see there, DGG agreed, but said However, I think it advisable to leave in enough information so that a reader will get an accurate idea of the nature of the entire enterprise.

In this message thread you'll find irreverent, unciteable, but I suspect accurate material about Writers Notes and its award (now the "Eric Hoffer Award"). I have trouble finding anything else.

Nobody objected to the proposed merge; I therefore went ahead and did it. (Though arguably after waiting too short a time.)

User:Egress13 removed the material about Writers Notes from the article on Klim on 24 February. The next day I reinserted it. Five hours later, User:Egress13 removed it again, with the edit comment Cleaning up facts: Writers Notes was not free, defunct for several years; the website does not offer paid consultations; the author has not been associated with it for several years.

The magazine (or ex-magazine)'s own website has been redone in the last ten days or so; now indeed the (humdrum) facts cited from it are no longer there.

If the author is no longer associated with the magazine/website, it strikes me as odd that the contact address for both (Writers Notes, Klim) is the same company at the same PO number. (Aware of the slipperiness of the content of Hopewell's various websites, I give "Webcite" URLs.) This magazine -- which has been known for its insightful interviews with literary lions such as William Styron (in his last interview), Tim O'Brien, and Mary Gordon, as well as contributions from noted authors Robert Gover, Thomas E. Kennedy, and others (as we were told earlier, though with no source) -- seems to have faded into oblivion. If this is so, then of course the material about it should remain deleted, and a redirect to it should as well. However, no CSD appears to cover the latter.

And the above is pretty much what I wrote at RfD. User:Thryduulf thereupon suggested undoing the merge and putting the article up for AfD. So here we are.

(NB there will -- or should -- be no links to this article, because I'd have previously pointed any toward the article on Klim. I think there were very few, but there would at least have been one from Klim as well as one from the later merged article on Klim's "Eric Hoffer Award". I suppose I could re-create the incoming links; but really, I think I've already spent quite enough time on a magazine that no library in Worldcat admits to stocking.)

-- Hoary (talk) 00:16, 26 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I do feel that you, DGG, haven't addressed the notability issue. --Bejnar (talk) 05:17, 26 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Could you elaborate a little on the notability issue as you see it? ¶ For your part, DGG, are you actually suggesting reversion of this to a redirect, and indefinite (full) protection of the redirect, and reversion of the article on Klim to our version and indefinite (full) protection of that? I must confess that the notion that you and I can wander around Wikipedia editing articles at will -- um, sorry, I mean editing them with scrupulous regard for policies and guidelines -- and then indefinitely protecting the results isn't utterly without appeal to me, but (aside from its probable unpopularity with other editors) it seems out of character for you. A sleepy typo, perhaps? -- Hoary (talk) 14:02, 26 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Oh I don't know. I suppose it would be nothing by the standards of sleb, cooking, pr0nographic, or toy (computer/motorbike/car/camera) magazine, but I'd guess that it's not at all bad for a literary mag. -- Hoary (talk) 14:02, 26 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You couldn't be more wrong. A mainstream literary publication like, say, Granta has circulation around 50,000, and even lesser publications can regularly manage 10,000-20,000. How low is 1500? Let's put it this way: it's lower than the student newspaper in my local middle school. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 14:50, 26 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I have to admit unfamiliarity with periodicals. I know rather more about books. In my part of the world, the most prestigious photography award is routinely given for books that have had print runs of 2,000 or so. Hysteric Glamour and Rathole are unusual in announcing the number more conspicuously and (usually) numbering each copy; although this page that lists them all doesn't specify the number for most, it's almost always under 1000 and sometimes as low as 400. Months after publication, the huge book Hokkaido (edition of 1500) by the ever-trendy Moriyama is still in stock. -- Hoary (talk) 15:44, 26 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You're really getting desperate here. Comparing a literary magazine with $200 limited-edition Japanese collectible photography monographs?!? I don't even know where to start pointin out how ridiculous that is. The only similarity is that both are made mostly of paper. The business models are obviously completely different: an art book can be a limited edition of a small number of copies not because it can't sell more but because it makes it more attractive to serious collectors willing to pay 200 bucks for a book. A magazine would never deliberately lower its circulation, if anything magazines want a large circulation to attract more talent and better advertising prices. In some cases magazines even artifically raise their circulation for this reason--for example, Newsday was caught doing so in 2004 which caused a major scandel in the publishing world. So yes, comparing a magazine to a $200 limited-edition book is rather ludicrous for all sorts of reasons. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 16:13, 26 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Yes of course the term "limited edition" appeals to snobs and other nitwits, but it is extraordinarily hard for me to provide you quickly with credible sources for the print runs of most other books. Let us stay with these limited, numbered editions for a minute. I have four of these Hysteric Glamour books and the highest list price among them was about 5,250 yen, or about 50 of your American dollars -- very similar to the price it would have had if it had not been in a "limited" edition. ¶ Moriyama's Hokkaido is a huge book and $200 is about what similarly-sized lumps of slaughtered tree cost here if they don't come from Taschen or Te Neues. (Consider Nachtwey's Inferno, though Phaidon priced it modestly.) Moreover, Hokkaido is not marketed as a "limited edition"; it merely has the size of its print run printed on it. "OR" informs me that Persona (1) had a run of 2000 and that its second, "popular" edition had a run of 5000; nothing "limited" about either. ¶ I've never suggested that this little magazine depressed its circulation. I'm not fully sure that it even existed, but if it did exist then I'm sure that its publisher would have wanted to sell lots and lots. -- Hoary (talk) 17:04, 26 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You're not exactly helping your point here, assuming there even is one. Let's examing this item by item. A book that costs $200 cannot be compared to a literary magaine. A series of books that cost $50 each cannot be compared to a literary magazine either. A book which sold 7000 copies is also not comparable to a literary magazine. 7000 is not the same as 1500, or even close, and books are not magazines. 1500 is so low that there's very little in general circulation to directly compare it to--some school papers, church bulletins, fanzines, office newsletters and the like might have similar circulation numbers, but the business model is too different to compare. The reason for this is that publishing a magazine under 5000 copies or so would tend to be unprofitable in most cases, see this link for a very general overview. Using those numbers, a magazine printing 1500 copies would have to charge $7 each and sell every single one to just recoup printing cost! Factor in salaries, office costs, advertising, distribution costs, etc and a micro-distribution magazine might need to charge $15 an issue just to break even! For reference, that's roughly 3 times the cost of an average American magazine. If the circulation and impact of this particular magazine was so low that it's difficult to determine whether it even existed, I think that rather proves my point. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 17:42, 26 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think 1500 copies for a literary magazine is quite respectable. A more apt comparison would perhaps be academic journals. Most publisher and editors of such journals would do anything to get such a high circulation. I estimate that perhaps 90% or more of all academic journals have circulations way below 1000. --Crusio (talk) 17:38, 27 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • My own uneducated guess would cautiously bring down your "90%" to "80%" but otherwise agree with you. On the other hand, this really is a different business model: academic journals may be subsidized and either way typically have high subscription rates (for institutions, sometimes rates I'd call astronomically high). I was going to consult Ulrich's yesterday but wasn't able to do so, and shan't today or tomorrow. I did however have a look at a copy of Christopher Anderson's book Capitolio which of course is a book (yeah yeah different business model) but which exhibits this interesting combination: (i) edition of 2000 copies (as is straightforwardly stated on its colophon, as is emphasized in the Magnum Photos page selling signed copies, but as goes unmentioned in its amazon.com page); (ii) well-printed, clothbound product; (iii) fairly widely discussed and highly regarded; (iv) real-world price from the world's best-loved monopolist of under $50; (v) new copies still available now, months after publication. You can move large quantities of the "middle of the road", but you need great luck to do so for anything else. ¶ The point is to avoid specious arguments for the deletion of articles, arguments that would be harmless here (if, as I suppose, the article will, for other good reasons, be deleted or turned back into a redirect) but that could harm elsewhere. -- Hoary (talk) 02:28, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • That's indeed why I made this argument, because despite thinking that the circulation numbers are decent, I still think this is not notable. As for 80%, I think my 90% is already optimistic. There are tens of thousands of academic journals, the best of them may have a circulation of a few thousand (not counting exceptional journals such as Science and Nature). The vast majority will have a couple of hundred. And some of these will be literary journals (admittedly different from literary magazines) and many influential literary journals (or magazines, in fact) have (or had) circulations of only a few hundred. Remember, we're not talking mass-market publishing here, but niche-market. --Crusio (talk) 10:59, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • A circulation of 1,500 is respectable for a lit mag, but keep in mind that a privately funded lit mag is highly unusual. Typically with a lit mag, an academic institution is covering the loses, and there will be loses. Eventually Hopewell Publications decided to no longer cover the shortfall and closed down the publication. Regarding the Wiki article as it stands, however much it pains me to say this, I vote deletion as well. The article is just not representative of the actual publication. --EGress13 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 13:35, 28 February 2010 (UTC).[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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