Punk Planet has announced that the magazine will cease publication after the current issue.
The fiscal crisis in the independent publishing world is wide-spread, systemic, and mostly without a solution. Unless publications have patrons (meaning a rich individual sponsor or a lucrative and stable nonprofit) they will almost certainly succumb to the fallout of recent bankruptcies.
Every last one of us. Including all of your most beloved zines and some of your favorite stores.
The facts are simple: newsstand sales do not translate to enough money to print and distribute (and if your distro goes under without paying out, that fact is irrelevant anyway). Subscriptions are better, but not enough. Advertising, as always, is the main source of income, and that is an unreliable revenue stream. Particularly if you are defiantly independent and serve a niche audience.
This has always been true. It’s worse now than it was ten years ago, it will be better in the future and then bad again. The whole thing is cyclical and right now we’re in a dark part of the cycle.
If your favorite publication is still in print, this is what you can do to help:
Buy merchandise and books direct from the source, instead of via external web sites.
Subscribe, and subscribe again.
If you have something to advertise and money to pay for ads, run one.
I don’t play the Who is Next game but can assure you that Punk Planet is not the last. For me this is of course deeply personal, since the people making these announcements are my friends.
AEM was practically a member of my family when we lived in Seattle. Dan Sinker is a truly awesome individual, and the person who took a risk and offered to publish Lessons in Taxidermy after watching one of my performances. Nobody else in the states wanted the book – unless I changed the title and ending.
Punk Planet as an institution had a good run; thirteen years is a long time in publishing terms. But it is never fun to see a project end when the people involved want it to continue, and the readers are still there.