I don't think the beefs are as much about content as editing. An editor's job is to make the writer look better. DGJ is respectable but needs better editing to become remarkable.
I guess I've been published about as much in the
DGJ as anyone ought to be. My first article in 1994--"Supply Side Economics"--led to a publishing contract with Safari Press in 1995, and 4 books since. The old saw about "Yesderdae I coundt eban spel auther an know I R won" is a perfect fit. And Dan C is responsible. However, the style sheet for the
DGJ is quite different than, for example,
Shooting Sportsman magazine, and a world apart from book publishers who pay rather than get paid.
Dan's
DGJ emphasis is on what he calls "eye candy." Every publisher has a readership-demographic template (style sheet). And while the readership of
SSM and
DGJ has some cross-overs, the articles I write for the
SSM must be more generalized and with wider appeal than those for the
DGJ, which can be more technical (but less Parker-centric than what I write for
Parker Pages). An exception was my
DGJ article, "Why Parker?", which was a "fetcher" (a pure play on controversy), the idea being to rile up the LCS-Ithaca-Lefever-Fox-Baker and other gun-specific true believers to get them to write something about their favoriate fowling pieces. It worked! Dan had a flood of retalitory articles about other guns and even published a "poison pen" rebuttal from one who otherwise would not have seen his name in print.
The trick to being published in the
DGJ is to have good pictures. The trick to not looking silly to those who actually read the accompaning article is to do your own editing (use Spel-Check, know a complete sentence when you see it, have a peer reviewer). And don't go off half-cocked--there's nothing timely about old doubles; set the article aside for some time before you final edit, to see if it still strikes a responsive chord some time after the "heat of the moment." Destry's Golden Plover article was two or three years, and twenty or more re-writes from pulling the trigger in Scotland, to the photo shoot on my farm in Illinois, to submission and final publication.
From a dollar-denominated standpoint, writing for magazines sucks; there's more money in standing behind the counter at McDonalds, and you get free French fries. Yet there is great satisfaction in having a story bottled up in one's mind that finally sees the light of day in print, even if it's just on a forum like this. My latest book,
Parker Guns: Shooting Flying took a lifetime of research, four years to write and photograph, and a year of composition and production at my publisher (and no free French fries).
In summary, small circulation magazines that publish articles about narrowly defined subjects of little or no interest to a broad spectrum of readers cannot command the writer-originated content or technical or editorial help of, say,
Sports Afield or the
New Yorker. The miracle is that we gun writers get published at all. John Houchins told me at Vegas in 2007 that he fronted $171,500 of his own money to see his book to fruition. The
Parker Story co-authors dug deep into their own pockets to produce their tome. On a best case scenario this writing gig is a break even proposition. So don't be too critical of the written words which appear in magazines of narrow interest (like the
DGJ).
To put this in prespective, I just cut a check for $38.75 to re-up another year's 4-issue subscription to the
DGJ(
SSM is under $30 for 6 issues); meanwhile, to get 4 issues of
Parker Pages costs $40, and the LCS newsletter is $25. Let us not bite the hand that feeds us the double-gun eye candy and associated reading material that we crave. However, if I were to wish one thing different, I would like to see less of the "same-old same-old"; IMHO there's too much in the
DGJ about British gun auctions in the UK; and in
SSM, much too much about Americans posing as European nobles and British Lords-of-the-Manor, plus there's an excess of Argentinean dead birds for my taste. But "different strokes..."
This Forum has some talent and knowledge as yet untapped by the magazines of our genre. Have at it guys. Anyone can post on the Internet; try your hand at the real thing. EDM
