Chapter 2
Learning the ropes
Sadly I have no record of when I actually wrote to Graham offering my services or when I actually met up with him and began to learn the ropes. This is a real shame as I have detailed so much of my time working on the fanzine – dates of meetings, important events etc – and wish now that I had made more of a record of those first few months when I was shadowing Graham around, finding out all about the hard work that was involved in producing a fanzine.
In the editorial for issue 45 of Spitting Feathers Graham explained his reasons for retiring from the fanzine business. I’d always wondered what, exactly, was involved in producing a fanzine and, as I’ve already stated, I couldn’t begin to fathom how it all came together. Looking back at that editorial in which Graham announced he was leaving, the words of warning were there:
“Of course as you have probably realised, there is a lot more to it (editing a fanzine) than writing an editorial column every month…and perhaps an editorial team would find things easier. Twenty to thirty hours a week isn’t that much when shared…but it’s a struggle on your own.”
The amount of time taken up producing the fanzine was only the start of it, as I was soon to realise. Indeed, in his brief return to the fanzine world at the start of the 2000/01 season (a sole issue of Wednesday Half Day Closing) Graham highlighted the very things that would also cause me the least joy during my two years as editor. On page 27 of WHDC Graham explained his, albeit short, return by highlighting the things that had made him to decide to pack it in in the first place – things he would no longer be doing with his newest fanzine:
“The part I liked least about producing SF was the business side of it all – co-ordinating sellers on match days, delivering SF to various newsagents and bookshops, and invoicing them was something I had inherited from my days at A View From The East Bank and it takes a lot of your time up. I hated it.”
I too came to despise this part of the job and eventually cut much of it out of my routine. Whilst I have no recollection of my initial thoughts on the distribution of the fanzine and all the other jobs that went with getting the fanzine sorted, a comment I made in issue 61 (during my second season as editor), as part of a riposte to the accusation that I was running a sloppy operation and not doing my job correctly (said article was from a chap called Simon who wrote under the pseudonym Peak Owl) highlights the work involved:
“Along with working a forty hour week I spend a heck of a lot of time reading, editing, typing up and setting work into the fanzine. Added to this is my contact and co-ordination with our only cartoonist Pete McKee, as well as meeting the printer’s deadlines, visiting all the outlets that sell the fanzine, organising the sellers, dealing with the bank as regards deposits and payments both to them and the printer.”
Issue 61 was the second issue of season 2000/01 and clearly I was still making the long, time-consuming trips round the city of Sheffield on the Friday afternoons that I’d collected the fanzine from the printers. When Graham had first taken me round all the outlets that stocked the fanzine I was too preoccupied with thoughts of how payment was organised to really take note of the long, often tedious, journey through Friday afternoon traffic. Amongst the outlets that stocked the fanzine were Waterstone’s in Orchard Square; Baxter’s News at Crookes; D. Beaumont’s on Middlewood Road; Lees News inside Morrison’s at Darnall; Junction Road News at Hunter’s Bar: the WHSmith in the railway station. A journey that could easily take several hours depending on traffic and whether there was anyone to take delivery when I arrived at each outlet. Pretty soon I jettisoned Waterstones and the WHSmith in the station as they both took an extortionate percentage of the cover price each time a copy was sold (both took 50%) and it simply wasn’t worth my while selling the fanzine in those outlets. Yes, Waterstones could be relied upon to shift anywhere between 20 and 30 copies at the beginning of my editorship but giving them anything between £15-£20 for doing very little simply wasn’t acceptable. The WHSmith in the station sold very few copies and still took 50% so that too was curtailed. I found Waterstone’s quite an arrogant and unfriendly business and wasn’t sorry to cease dealing with them. They clearly felt that my little publication really wasn’t worth their time and seemed to treat the fanzine as a bit of a hindrance.
Anyway, I have vague recollections of travelling round the city of Sheffield one sunny Friday afternoon with Graham. I would no doubt have been aware of just how long the journey took – anyone who has ever tried to travel through Crookes or near Hunter’s Bar during a busy afternoon will know only too well how frustrating and time-consuming such a trip can be. However, I think the sheer scale of what I was undertaking – how to deal with large retail outlets, ensuring that invoicing and payment was correct, how to keep accurate records of the merchandise that each shop took, the need for proper receipts – that the tedium of the operation probably took a back seat. Once I became proficient at the distribution side of things, the long afternoons driving round Sheffield soon began to drive me mad. On top of this there was the cost of fuel. In itself, the journey may not have used extortionate amounts of fuel (although it was still something I hadn’t initially budgeted for) but the constant stopping and starting that the afternoon traffic necessitated meant that I used far more fuel than the mileage would have consumed on a more constant drive.
Graham was a great help and explained everything as we went along; making introductions to the various people I would be dealing with once the fanzine was mine. They were all friendly enough and they seemed a lot less frightening than I had imagined they would. For some reason I had built them all up to be hard-faced business folk who would look down on me and try to swindle me at every turn. Nothing could have been further from the truth (although, as I have already mentioned, Waterstone’s seemed to view the fanzine as more trouble than it was worth). Over the next two years I was to develop sound relationships with them all.
One thing that had intrigued me for many months, and especially since Graham told me he was happy for me to take over, was just how the fanzine went from electronic articles on a computer to a hard-copy that was suitable to read and sell. It seems simple and obvious now but at the time, to me at least, I couldn’t really fathom it. I simply couldn’t see massive print mills rolling out copy. I suppose, as I had never had any need to understand how these things worked, it was understandable that I was a little bit whet behind the ears. Visiting Martin Lacey at Juma on Wellington Street was intriguing to me, not only because I finally got to understand how the process worked but also because I saw so many other fanzines in the process of being printed. I loved fanzines and to see so many being ‘born’ in the same place – and in Sheffield at that – was great. Sadly I can’t recall many of the titles he printed but I’m pretty sure A Load of Bull was one of them and there were certainly publications for Liverpool dotted about. Little seems to be known about Martin Lacey now and searching the internet doesn’t bring up a great deal, which is a shame. Clearly though, he was a fairly big player in the fanzine business at one stage.
Something else that I hated about the ‘business’ side of the fanzine was the advertising. Now I had always believed that fanzines shouldn’t have had adverts in them but it was clear that they were a vital source of extra income – something that would become ever more important as time went on – and so I accepted that I had to at least maintain a similar income from advertising to that which Graham had enjoyed. Graham’s final issue of the fanzine carried four adverts. For my first issue I only had three adverts. This number altered as the seasons progressed but was never higher than four. Sometimes I had adverts from companies Graham had used in the past and sometimes there were new companies. Whatever, I always hated the issue of advertising. If they were established and regularly advertised in the fanzine then I disliked the fact that we had adverts at all. What was even worse was when I went out seeking new advertisers because we needed the money. The principle of the thing annoyed me but I was also no salesman. I’d never wanted to be a salesman and so when I had to enter shops and ask if they wished to pay to advertise in my fanzine I despised every minute of it. I’m amazed I got anyone to agree to pay me money for the privilege of putting a little advert for their business in the fanzine, but they did. I have absolutely no idea how much I charged the poor sods but I’d have loved to have known how much extra business those adverts gained for the small shops that agreed to advertise in Spitting Feathers. I bet it wasn’t much.
Anyway, horrible business issues aside, the process of actually producing a fanzine seemed fairy straight forward; set the fanzine on the PC, print it out, take the paper copy to Martin at Juma and they’d do the rest. In addition to this, all I had to do was stipulate any requirements for front and back covers and provide the photos and captions to bring my ideas to life. All very simple. Graham made it look so easy and from the discussions I had with him and Martin I was in no doubt that it would be a piece of cake. Events leading up to the release of my first issue were to prove me very wrong!
All the letters, articles, cartoons and a myriad other things had arrived in dribs and drabs over the summer as the deadline for my first issue got ever closer. The deadline had been set for “approximately 10 days before the first home game of the season” which, I had been assured, would give me plenty of time to get everything set and to the printer. However, in my inexperience, as soon as an article arrived I placed it into the fanzine template, filling up space as I went. All very organised, I thought. However, as the deadline approached, a whole raft of stuff dropped into my PO Box and I simply didn’t have enough space to fit a lot of it in, or if I did it was only by rearranged much of what I had already set in the template. I couldn’t just put the most recent stuff to one side as it contained work from many of the fanzine’s most prolific and talented writers. Thus I spent a lot of time rearranged all the articles and editing pieces of work so that they would fit into the space I had available. Many extra hours were needed and a lesson was learned: never set any articles/pictures/cartoons into the fanzine template until all the work is in. Others may disagree with this mantra but it was one I stuck by for the rest of my time as editor (bar one or two articles which were like clockwork in both content length and regularity). Something else that made the job just that little but more time-consuming in those early days was the fact that most of the articles were sent via old-fashioned mail. This meant that to be able to edit the work I either had to scan it (if I was lucky and the text was large enough for the rudimentary OCR software to recognise and convert to electronic type) or I had to type up the work myself. Either way it could sometimes be a very frustrating business. Some correspondents used the tiniest type imaginable and the OCR software simply could not recognise it and convert it to electronic copy and so I would spend large amounts of time converting it myself. In addition to having to type the work, I often had to decipher what they were actually trying to say as some of the work was less than grammatically correct. I shall mention no names on this score as they were all valuable contributors, without whom I would not have been able to produce the fanzine, but the standard of some of the articles was very poor – to the point where sometimes I virtually re-wrote the entire article (no one ever complained that I’d changed what they’d written though, so either they didn’t notice or they were happy for me to do it!) Reading this now it may be hard for many to believe that work was sent on paper but when you consider that my mum and dad didn’t get the internet put in at their home (where I was still residing at the time) until Monday 19th April 1999 you can perhaps see that the use of email wasn’t as pervasive as it was to become.
Anyway, I finally got the fanzine set how I wanted it and I began to print it out – all 54 pages of it. Now this may seem like nothing in these days of swift laser and in-jet printers but back in 1999 I was still using a dot-matrix printer. It took ages for the bloody fanzine to print and often the pages slipped whilst going through the printer so I had to re-print several of them. Finally, though, I had all the pages printed and ready to take to Juma. This was where the shit really hit the fan. Martin took one look at it and said something along the lines of the quality of printing not being anywhere near good enough to make printing plates from. The colours weren’t deep enough and the print was far too faint. There was no way he could make a fanzine from the terribly printed rubbish I had brought to him. I stood there, dumbfounded. I had no idea what I was going to do. There was simply no time for me to go and re-do it and even if there were, the result would be exactly the same. Thankfully, Martin came to my rescue. He told me that if I could bring the publication over on a floppy disk (yes, they were THE means of storing data back then) he would print the whole thing out on paper, using his laser printer, and make the prints from that. Thank God. I have no idea what I would have done had he not agreed to this. After a mad dash home to get the floppy disk with the fanzine on I rushed back to Juma and handed the disk to Martin. I can’t recall what was actually said, word for word, between us that day but I do still recall his exact words as I turned to leave: Dan, get a fucking decent printer!
But back to the last few issues of season 1998-99 when Graham was showing me the ropes. Looking back now at my first editorial in issue 49 I cringe somewhat at the fact that I signed off with the moniker Danno! I mean, how pathetic is that? Thankfully that particular nom de plume didn’t see the light of day again. I did try the old Two Ronnies finish (“it’s goodbye from me and it’s goodbye from him”) at some stage, I think as a reference to the fact that both me and Ian were supposed to be editing the fanzine. Again, this rubbish didn’t see the light of day after its first airing. What is clear from reading my two editorials from issues 49 and 50 is that I was very much finding my feet and didn’t want to write anything that may have been viewed as too controversial. Maybe this had something to do with the fact that I still felt it was Graham’s vessel and I didn’t want to upset anyone whilst he was still in charge. Mostly though, I think I was just very inexperienced and hadn’t really begun to develop my own style and personality. Certainly, during my first two editorials, there are far more examples of me sitting on the fence or agreeing with other writers than there ever would be once I was in sole charge. I don’t think this was a conscious decision at the time, just a natural order of things. Once I wasn’t likely to upset or offend Graham I automatically went about telling people what I thought. I finished the 1998-99 season in a somewhat downbeat mood, stating in issue 49’s editorial that:
“Both myself and my brother are very much leaning towards the unthinkable prospect of Wilson’s Wonders being relegated at the end of the season.”
Surprisingly though, I only had harsh words to say about Booth, Srnicek (no surprise) and Briscoe (ditto). On these three players I simply stated:
“How any of these players could even be considered good enough for our reserves, let alone the first team, beggars belief.”
I had no hostility towards Wilson and was fully behind him as our manager (this was a stance I was to keep for the majority of the following season.) In issue 50’s editorial I was lamenting a problem that is still all too familiar some 15 years later:
“I find myself wondering how we are going to attract anyone to this club now. We have a chairman who (doesn’t) want to spend money (on players)…Sadly there appears to be no one who is rich and supports the Owls. It is this complete lack of interest (from) any prospective saviours…that leads me to believe it is going to be a very long time until we begin to see the rise of Sheffield Wednesday Football Club.”
And we were still in the Premier League at that stage! Nevertheless, I finished the final editorial of season 1998-99 dreaming of a successful future for the club:
“Where would we be without the close season? It allows us to begin dreaming once more.”
There isn’t a lot about that close season that really sticks in the mind as far as my preparations for the fanzine go. There were obviously little things that needed sorting, the kind of things that I hadn’t given any thought to when I was considering taking over the fanzine. Things like arranging a PO Box; setting up a business account at the bank; acquiring receipt books and invoice sheets; dealing with the mailing lists for subscribers. All these things needed my attention. Granted, some of it was simply a matter of Graham transferring records to me (in the case of the list of subscribers) but I still had the responsibility of ensuring that said subscribers received their copies of the fanzine on the day the issue was released. This was to become another journey that had to be made on the Friday that each new issue was collected from the printers. I prided myself on making sure that subscribers received their copies on the day that we started selling each new issue (sometimes the day before if I was really organised and had got the fanzine to the printers early).
Certainly my first close season as editor was a mixture of blind panic, whirlwind activity and moments of tranquil calm during which I really thought I was getting my act together. Yes, I made mistakes, as I have already touched upon, and I continued to make them throughout my two years as editor, but generally I thought all was going exceedingly well, all things considered.
I’ve already detailed the problems with the quality of the printing that my dot-matrix printer produced, and also the fact that Martin Lacey saved that first issue. However, looking back at that first issue now I can’t help but be a little disappointed by it. The column layout I chose was horrible – they were far too narrow and too much of the page was wasted. Some of the darker print was patchy – which is surprising considering Martin had used his own printer. Perhaps he used some of the pages I’d printed on my dot-matrix after all. The ‘Classified Ads’ section is all but empty and looks terrible and many of the photos I used look blocky and are often stretched too much. Generally, it looks like a poor imitation of the fanzine that Graham had entrusted to me. The writing inside was of the usual high standards, of course, but anyone looking at the aesthetic value of my first offering would wonder what the hell I’d been doing during that close season. I even hate the front cover (I was never a big fan of any of our full-colour covers) which has a sickly yellow tint to it. All in all, that first issue of season 1999-2000 was a huge disappointment for me (and most probably for a great many readers).
In many respects I suppose my first fanzine as sole editor simply mirrored our team. Both had such high hopes during the summer; both had a leader who clearly felt he was up to the task; both had lavished lots of money up front (Wednesday on new strikers, Spitting Feathers on glossy covers) and yet both, on that Saturday afternoon in August 1999, were immediately found wanting.
He's reight, tha knows! 