SINGAPORE: SO MANY MAGAZINES
I feel like a kid in a candy store.
I am in Singapore for a couple of days and spent some time (and far too much money) in its two largest bookstores - Kinokuniya and Borders - yesterday evening. By way of comparison the Orchard Road branch of Kinokuniya is about four or five times the size of the one in Siam Paragon, and offers about four or five times the number of English language magazines.
There are titles from the United Kingdom, United States and Australia that simply never make it to Bangkok. Obviously the market here for English is far bigger than that in Thailand, but it seems there are loads of locally produced magazines in almost every category. I wonder how they survive?
4 comments:
You are in Singapore!!
Yeah .. but flying back up to Bangkok tomorrow.
Knowing a few people in the Singapore publishing industry they only mostly survive by keeping as close to the smell of an oily rag as possible. Most common tricks - dramatically underprinting on claimed circ, high paid ad/ed to normal content ratios, changing printers to evade outstanding debts, keeping ed staff down to often no more than one FT editor and so on. Another trick they use is pretending to be pan-Asian!
Graeme, thanks for your comment. Those are some interesting and valid points, and I will be writing about some of these during the coming week.
Briefly, I had assumed publishers in Singapore were audited more than those in Thailand but now I'm not so sure. And the pan-Asian claim is also interesting, and one I will elaborate on this week.
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