How It Was Done

We have spoken many times of how each issue of AP was produced in the two days before deadline.

This is true.

Publishers will tell you a magazine is created like this: the Ed's grand vision, supplemented by discussion with the Art Ed, translates into a series of reviews, a sprinkling of features, and (ugh) tips which are commissioned of the staff writers or the freelancers, with their due dates staggered so the issue comes together smoothly and continuously throughout the time allotted.

Simultaneously, the Disk Editor secures the latest playable demos and searches PD libraries to find extra complete games for the pretty readers.

Ten days before deadline, all the writing is done, and as the Art Assistants polish off the regular pages - the Art Ed is of course wholly concentrating on the big features - the Prod Ed coordinates captioning, checking of final proofs, and signing-out by the Ed of the completed film. The printers then step in, and 60,000 issues appear to be snapped up by you, our readers.

Publishers will also tell you a magazine can be run with two people on staff, that 13 issues a year is a fair and useful thing and that they could go out on the street this minute and randomly pick six people who'd be just as good at your job.

Bless them. May their lines continue for ten thousand years.

Clearly the final step to becoming a publisher is to renounce all qualities bar financial acumen. (We've actually seen perfectly lovely people promoted to a publishership and within weeks be unrecognisably distant.) As mags tussled with each other to prove mightiest, so publishers sought to be better than one other, or at least to make the other fellow look bad. Here we celebrate what an accumulative half-century or so of experience has taught us makes up a publisher with the aid of an electronic photograph from the mildly unsettling Warner World Of Baldness (&quotWe'll Shave You Bald And Spray-Paint Your Head For Only $19.95") short.
"Yessireebobaroonie!"