Now and then I get asked the very simple question, “What ever happened with iHero and Cyber Age Adventures?” Occasionally they’ll follow-up with, “Don’t you miss it? Do you ever think of starting it up again?”
The answer to both of those latter questions, of course, is “Yes.” Yes, I do. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about. No, we’re here to address the more painful and convoluted question of what actually happened… and why it never happened again.
Cyber Age Adventures, for those not in the know, was a magazine that I began publishing on January 1, 1999 that specialized in what we called “superhero fiction.” That is to say prose stories about superheroes, often without pictures. This was not a comic book. There were no sequential panels. No word balloons. We were telling literate, pathos-packed stories about people. They just happened to be people with super powers.
We published weekly, at first. Then monthly. I picked up a few staff writers along the way. Sean Taylor. Tom Waltz. Matt Hiebert. Frank Burns. We picked up a few awards, a few fans, more than a few friends. Publishing online is a dicey business, though, and I never found a reliable way to monetize our efforts. I published a few anthologies of our collected stories and sold those at conventions and Amazon.com, but after six years in the trenches, me and the boys decided to make last giant push toward the Big Time. We were going to go into print.
There are a lot of things that go into making a print magazine. Luckily, this was something I’d had some experience with. I started my writing and editing career at the helm of a college literary magazine, where I steered us to a first place award for the first time in the magazine’s 26-year history. But compared to the ocean of publishers I was about to join with CAA’s print mag, my college days were little more than splashing around in the kiddie pool. But something had to be done. We couldn’t go on as we had been. It was costing me money out of my pocket every week to pay for the writers, the hosting fees, the cover art. And, truth be told, I was getting a little burned out with doing something that so few people seemed to value.
I had taken a hiatus for a little while the year before, writing other things, getting published in other venues. I sold the CAA Tarot deck to U.S. Games. I signed a six-book deal. But I’d left the other guys in the lurch with my absence and I was just enough of a control freak not to allow them to keep putting out issues while I sowed my writerly oats elsewhere. That was, I think, the beginning of the end, right there. Sean and Tom both went on to other projects (with great success), and I took on new partners when the print magazine was given the green light.
Printing a magazine isn’t hard. Publishing a magazine is a different story altogether.
Printing is the physical stuff. It’s putting the content into the layout, choosing the paper, shopping for a printer. That was all stuff I’d done before. I made my living in graphic design and printing, so that was a world I knew. The rest was a whole new enchilada.
Okay. So let’s break it down so you know what we’re dealing with.
The first thing we did was create a 24-page preview of the magazine to shop around to distributors. Distributors are the folks who show your magazine to the buyers at the major chains (Borders, B&N, etc.). If you don’t make a good showing with them, you’re dead in the water. Luckily, we made quite a splash.
We received pre-orders for our inaugural issue in the triple digits. Over 2,000 copies they wanted. We cheered.
Armed with our purchase orders, we set out seeking investors. This part wasn’t hard. We had a guarantee of purchase from the distributors, so it was really just a loan to get the printing done and we’d pay them back as soon as the distributors sent their checks. We tried to sell advertising space, too, but we ended up giving it away just to put a dollar in the tip cup to entice future advertisers.
After shopping around, it turned out that the printer who gave us the best price, even with shipping costs, was in Shanghai. We looked at the price for 2500 copies. For an absurd $50 more, we could get 3000 copies. For just $100 or so more than that, we could get a whopping 5000 copies. The printing cost for each magazine just a little over $1 each. Our cover price? $4.95. Think of the profit! A no-brainer, right? So we did. We ordered 5000 copies of Cyber Age Adventures #1 and they printed them and put them on a boat bound for California.
California?
Yes. California.
I live in Florida. This was less than helpful, but that’s where the boat ships to. So I had to get a customs agent (for no small fee) to accept the shipment. Except customs held up our shipment for “suspicious activity” and we had to wait to have it released, as well as paying for the right to have them manually inspect each box, as well the fee to x-ray them for dangerous… somethings. I don’t know whats.
When the distributors order their copies, you don’t send them en masse. You have to break apart the shipment and send the individual chains the quantities they requested. 113 copies here, 228 there, 42 copies to Newark. Somebody has to do this by hand. Somebody, as I mentioned, in California. This is another fee.
As our agent began to break apart the shipment and prepare it for each address, they discovered that the bar code on our front cover wouldn’t scan. The wrong font or somesuch. So each issue had to be stickered, by hand, to the tune of $.25 each. If you do that math, you’ll find that’s $1,250 we hadn’t counted on.
Also, when I chose the heavier, glossy stock paper for the interior pages, I hadn’t thought far enough ahead to consider that the heavier stock was, in fact, heavier. And when you’re talking about 5000 of them, it gets quite heavy indeed. Our costs for shipping both from China and again out to the distributors was roughly twice what it would have been with a thinner stock of paper.
But that’s okay, right? Our profit margin was certainly high enough to account for these small hiccups in the road, no?
No. 
Because the distributors don’t work for free. You sell them your magazine at 60% off the cover price. They in turn sell it to the stores at 50% off the cover price and the store makes the lion’s share of the profit. The other thing they don’t tell you up front is that they don’t pay you on delivery. No, no. And they don’t mention that you don’t get paid for every magazine you sent them. You only get paid for those magazines that you sent them that they sold. So if you send them 100 copies of your awesome little magazine and they only sell 20 copies of it, they’ll send you a check 90 days later (yes, 90 days later) for 40% of the cover price for those 20 copies and not a penny more. The other 80 copies? They get destroyed, their covers torn off and their bodies discard into dumpsters out back like a mob hit.
We’d had more than 2000 pre-orders, which was unheard of for a first-time magazine. But when you subtract the cost of the 24-page preview (which came out of pocket), minus the customs agent fee, minus the x-rays and manhandling, minus the extra shipping, minus the stickering, minus the destroyed copies and the power of attorney documents you had to prepare, what’s left over is a negative number.
Not “no money.” Less than no money. We owed people money. For a magazine that “sold” an incredible 2000 copies out of the gate. Some of our investors got paid back out of my own pocket. Some of them, chalking it up to the risk of investing, never got paid back at all. Some of those people were us.
And this, my friends, is a publishing success story.
We had a second issue in the can and waiting to go while all this happened. Stories were written, art was commissioned, deadlines were met. We simply never went to press with it. We never went to press again. The magazine folded and the partners went their separate ways.
It’s been years since all this happened and I’m still in touch with Sean and Tom and Matt. They’re all doing well, still out there creating, still doing me proud. Do I think about the magazine sometimes? Do I want to put the band back together and give it another shot, armed with my hard-won knowledge? You bet I do. But the simple fact is that the band doesn’t need this anymore. They’re too busy signing book deals and being the editors of their own magazines, or making documentary films.
I’d like to give you a happier ending than this, Dear Reader, but there isn’t one to be had. We did fine works. We are all, I think, proud of them. And I’m often sorrier than I can say that my ignorance in these matters ended our fine and stellar run on such a dour note. But you may see a collection of CAA stories come from somewhere before too long. I might… just might… have something to do with that.
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