why page skips in articles to back of book?

[admin]

most of your articles are picture & tech heavy, and I often want to refer back to the pics or previous paragraph, and I HATE having to flip all the way from the front to the rear of the magazine.

i always read AIM when i was on a submarine because one of my buddies subscribed, but i have moved now, and I got an issue off the news stand to get a subscriptoin form, and the very first tech article (strokers?) was split from front to rear.

i can't bring myself to subscribe until you have all the pages on one article in order, it's just one of those things that irk me.

who agrees?

Posted by: 04ctd on Jul 24, 06 9:56:38 pm

[admin]

I agree. I used to work for an aviation magazine which had the policy of keeping all feature stories together with an occasional jump for that evil advertising. That magazine wasn't the size of American Iron, and the larger magazines have limitaions on how long a story can run in sequence before it has to jump. The smaller magazine could afford to have a well dedicated just to features. I wouldn't let this irk me to the point that I don't subscribe. There's too much good stuff in American Iron Magazine to miss out on (My personal fave tech piece was "How to Install a Toto-Flush on a Road King and Ride it from Rhode Island to Sturgis.")

Posted by: mikep on Jul 25, 06 11:50:10 am

[admin]

I wish the answer to this question were a simple one. There are so many considerations when laying out the magazine and unfortunately, the explanation to this question could easily fill a small book. LOL! You would learn way more than you ever wanted to know about magazine production, and you could easily devote a full day to absorbing it all. Everyone does the best they can to keep things flowing, but what might appear as simple change in an article, could easily cause a massive revision over several pages in the magazine. And as if that's not enough, lets talk deadlines and the often sporatic way material is written, produced and submitted. It's all quite abstract and the art department does an amazing job of making it look great every month within the time alotted.

Posted by: Shooter Bob on Aug 5, 06 12:42:35 pm

[admin]

shooter, agreed, it's tough.

i DON'T mind have advertising in between the story pages, or having one column of text & rest advertising in the story, i just want the story to be in sequence in the magazine.

the other side is, you incur more work on ~100 people at the magazine, vice having a million readers flipping pages. are we not paying you for your time? our time is valuable to us, i want to ENJOY my leisure reading AIM, not get PO'd digging around to see the pics the article referred to.

it's just that i don't enjoy reading a magazine that skips pages enough to even dig from front to back to find the continuation of the article.

FWIW, i haven't even read the one issue i did buy, because it winds me up to dig thru pages, esp if you leave it on back of the crapper, then you lose all track of where you are.

i think AIM has some eccentric folks, with some solid viewpoints & counter points, and like to think that i would enjoy riding & swapping lies with most of them.

to me, this is one of the things that separates a top notch magazine, that makes it a "cut above"

Posted by: 04ctd on Aug 11, 06 10:53:18 pm

[admin]

WHAT...???

Posted by: frisco-rigid on Aug 12, 06 12:26:49 am

[admin]

I assure you, the construction and sequencing of every issue is carefully planned out by both the editorial and art depts. Article flow is built around a standard layout format, and includes a structure to accomodate advertising. As far as not subscribing (or even reading a given issue) based upon your aversion to flipping pages, well I'll simply echo frisco's sentiments.

Posted by: mc5aw on Aug 14, 06 11:24:42 am