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MaxQ

Tripoli 2747
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I used to buy the magazine at my local HobbyTowns (there are two in my area).
They haven't had the magazine for over a year.

I asked the manager why they don't carry it...he said he thought the magazine went out of business a long time ago.
He wasn't interested in looking in it either.
They carry a full assortment of Estes/low power kits...don't know why they won't carry it.

I haven't seen it at Barnes and Noble in the hobby crafts magazine section either.
These retailers seem to have the usual Military modeler, Finescale and Scale Auto/Kalmabch stuff.

Is the distribution arrangement too difficult for retail local outlets to carry it?

Do you have to join NAR to get the magazine now?'
 
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You can subscribe to it:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00006KXXW/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

It doesn't cost much more to join NAR. If you are under 21, it is just $5 a year more otherwise its $22 more.

But, I think most of us would still like to see the magazine on store shelves. Picking up a rocketry magazine on impulse at a store about 25 years ago was one of the things that prodded me to get back into the hobby.

-- Roger
 
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I asked the manager why they don't carry it...he said he thought the magazine went out of business a long time ago.
He wasn't interested in looking in it either.
That is a lie, maybe they don't do retail versions anymore but I cannot imagine why.
 
I used to buy the magazine at my local HobbyTowns (there are two in my area).
They haven't had the magazine for over a year.

The HobbyTown in Austin carries the magazine, and has for many years.

I asked the manager why they don't carry it...he said he thought the magazine went out of business a long time ago.
He wasn't interested in looking in it either.

It isn't the internet that is killing hobby shops, but poor business practices.

James
 
The HobbyTown in Austin carries the magazine, and has for many years.



It isn't the internet that is killing hobby shops, but poor business practices.

James
I've lost three hobby shops where I live over the last five or ten years (the Mom and pop variety) here...and two that specialized in scale modeling in NoVA went under.
HobbyTown is the only game in town, but I hear more and more complaints about their inventory.

The hobby is so taken over by RTF foamie RC planes and Parkflyers and low cost drones that basic scratch building supplies and RC parts seem to be drying up.
I found a better selection of balsa///basswood wood at the local PlazaArt store.

You'd think given they sell a lot of low power rocket kits for the kids...that they would carry the national magazine.
 
You'd think given they sell a lot of low power rocket kits for the kids...that they would carry the national magazine.
Have you read SPORT ROCKETRY? The latest issue devotes 13 pages to a list of all certified rocket motors and a list of all the NAR sections in the country.

I like the magazine, I've written several articles for it, and I wish it the best of luck, but I don't have any illusions that it has any mass market appeal whatsoever.
 
Have you read SPORT ROCKETRY? The latest issue devotes 13 pages to a list of all certified rocket motors and a list of all the NAR sections in the country.

I like the magazine, I've written several articles for it, and I wish it the best of luck, but I don't have any illusions that it has any mass market appeal whatsoever.

Not recently, but I have a collection of them dating back to the 1980's....there have been some very fine scale project articles....and the national/international contest reviews are interesting.
 
Have you read SPORT ROCKETRY? The latest issue devotes 13 pages to a list of all certified rocket motors and a list of all the NAR sections in the country.

They do this once a year. Nothing new or surprising/upsetting about that.

I suspect if Tom Beach (the editor) got more interesting content to run without generating it himself (as he has done in several recent issues) he'd do it.
 
When I first started back into rocketry, I actually enjoyed seeing a list of motors and finding out what clubs were near me.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using Rocketry Forum mobile app
 
They do this once a year. Nothing new or surprising/upsetting about that.
I wasn't surprised or upset, but let's face it, this isn't going to make the magazine a commercial success at the newsstand, and that kind of content can easily be accessed on the NAR website.

I think all hobby magazines are struggling -- certainly there was a big dieback in R/C mags a few years ago. We're lucky that SPORT ROCKETRY continues to exist for NAR members -- remember that Tripoli's magazine is online-only now.
 
Have you read SPORT ROCKETRY? The latest issue devotes 13 pages to a list of all certified rocket motors and a list of all the NAR sections in the country.

I like the magazine, I've written several articles for it, and I wish it the best of luck, but I don't have any illusions that it has any mass market appeal whatsoever.

I totally agree with this sentiment. The articles got better once NAR started paying for them. However, the technical content is still lacking in most issues. The pages of certified motors and NAR sections are just dead space. The annual summaries of NARCON, NARAM, TARC, and FIA competitions get tedious very fast, as do the yammering of old farts fawning over Vern and Gleda Estes and stuff that happened 40 years ago.

I am pretty confident that nobody (especially anybody under the age of 55) is looking for Sport Rocketry at my local Barnes and Noble. I find this forum to be far more interesting and useful than SR.

(and yes, I contributed articles to SR, as well.)
 
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A very good local magazine shop used to carry it. I picked it up a few times. but they haven't for a few years now. Their shelves have slowly been loosing the odd publication..

I remember the R/C 'die off' a few years ago, with RCM being a big loss to me. (and all the complaining about MAN, that it was all Ads, ARFs, and never a bad review (and the articles were more pictures than text..) yet survives.) FlyRC came along with great fan-fare, but also soon died off..

Don't care too much for what Kalmbach publishing (?) puts out. Except for railroad Modeller.. about the only "hobby' related magazine I read.. Their others, I find are just catalogues.. and/or overpriced..

We should all write an article for SR.. it is too much of a quick read..
 
Sadly, there are very few of the old kind of newstands around... I used to get a lot of magazines from them back in the day. Electronics magazines, computer magazines (remember Byte?), hobby magazines, all kinds. It was great to be able to just browse around to see what was out there. Now if it's not in Barnes & Nobles it's probably not available anywhere.
 
I have most of my copies of Sport Rocketry (and American Space Modeling) from when I joined Nar to Now. (Aug 1989). Got my Jan/Feb issue in the mail the other day. Sad to see my article wasn't in this issue. Maybe the next.
 
(and all the complaining about MAN, that it was all Ads, ARFs, and never a bad review (and the articles were more pictures than text..) yet survives.) FlyRC came along with great fan-fare, but also soon died off..

.....

We should all write an article for SR.. it is too much of a quick read..

Having written for Fly RC and MAN (and maybe twice for Model Aviation - the AMA's house magazine) as well as RC Groups I can explain about those reviews if you like. Basically, if I reviewed something I didn't like, the article didn't get published. That is true on all those platforms.

Yes, we should all submit articles to Tom Beach for Sport Rocketry so that he has more material. That's what I was implying in my previous post. I have a couple of things I should do myself...
 
Magazine are a very low margin product for a hobby shop. They have to devote a fair amount of space to display them, and contrasting those margins vs. other things they could sell in the space devoted to them makes the tradeoff of sell vs. not sell a pretty easy decision for a store owner. Unless the magazine bring lots more foot traffic into the store, they're probably not a great use of space.

For the magazine publisher, it's all about ads. Ads pay the bulk of commercial magazine costs, and unless you can demonstrate the market penetration and results, there's no way for a publisher to turn a profit.

I learned all I needed to know about the magazine business when I was working to unscrew the Sport Rocketry operation back in 1995-1997. It was not the most fun I ever had as NAR President, but I sure learned a lot about magazines . . . :-(
 
Having written for Fly RC and MAN (and maybe twice for Model Aviation - the AMA's house magazine) as well as RC Groups I can explain about those reviews if you like. Basically, if I reviewed something I didn't like, the article didn't get published. That is true on all those platforms.

I remember the 'debates' on RCU & RC groups about the mags, about the always favorable reviews. If I recall, the consensus was that all the article / reviews typically ended with "best plane ever". (it came across that the reviews were paid product endorsements). I guess we all wanted to see some reviews, as compared to other similar offerings.. (Car mags tend to compare this vs that, same with a few camera mags..) The chance to see if one was really better than another, and why (or why not).. And to be able to make a purchase based on the reviews.. RCM had reviews, and had the assembly / building process detailed to a certain level. Something you could learn from. But then again, that was when you did actually "build" something..
 
I only wrote three airplane reviews and one gas-to-electric conversion article (if I remember correctly) that got published. Three of these were in MAN, one was in a very early issue of Fly RC. One other got killed by MAN/the kit maker because it wasn’t positive enough (the airplane had a nasty handling quirk that it shared with a couple of others by the maker and the Astro Flight Astro Sport). Most of my writings were about equipment - speed controls, motors, chargers - both in print and at RC Groups’ predecessor site ezonemag.com. In many of the latter I did compare/contrast kinds of things.

But it generally took me longer than the publishers liked for me to do my write ups. RC Groups in particular has gotten very itchy to have reviews done quickly. I never sold an article to RCM.

My very first article in a national magazine was a review of the Jomar SC-1 electronic speed control in the long late-lamented Model Builder magazine. [It was done using the word processor “Speedscript” on a Commodore 64!!] That one started my habit of giving all my tiny little comments/complaints/suggestions to the suppliers (in that case Joe Utasi) while I was working on the article. This often resulted in improvements made to the product before the articles actually saw print (or posting on the Ezone).

My reentry into rocketry combined with where the electric power market has gone has put an end to my desire to write that stuff any more. But I have done a little behind-the-scenes/beta test stuff with a couple of alitimeter vendors so I’m still keeping my hand in a little bit...
 
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