Whatever Happened To Secret Magazine?
Back when there used to be lots more big box bookstores with huge magazine racks and I was still in the habit of buying actual paper books and magazines, there was always a stylish fetish magazine called Secret. It was expensive and hard to find (I think most of the actual issues in my collection were bought used on eBay) but I’d see it for sale from time to time and admire it. But I haven’t been in a bookstore in over a year and I haven’t seen Secret in quite a bit longer than that. Whatever happened to it?
Well, a chance web search the other day landed me on the Secret magazine web page. And it turns out that the most recent issue (and from the sound of things, perhaps final) edition was #36, which came out in a limited edition in September 2011. The reason for the magazine’s decline are pretty much encoded in my first paragraph:
One year has passed and I was only able to produce one issue. What has happened? To be quite honest, my USA distributors didn’t pay me for the last two issues and I was almost broke, finished. Thanks to a reader, a fan, an admired of Secret Magazine, I was able to print this issue, but sadly enough, it was only printed at 1000 copies! A limited edition! A collectors item!
We were forced to reduce the print run of SECRET Magazine because nobody is buying it anymore. Again why? Probably because our readers now all have Internet, notepads, smart phones, where a quick fix is so easy, so fast, and so virtual! Sex, porn, fetish, rubber, leather, dominatrix, Mistresses…it’s all available online, for free, so people don’t buy quality products anymore. We have passed from the paper area to the digital world. Most of the magazines are online now. News travels at the speed of Face book pages, twitters, blogs, and so on, that paper publications are unable to follow this. It’s called evolution.
Fortunately there is some good news. The Secret publisher is still selling such issues as remain in print, and many others (it looks like about 17 issues) are available for free in .pdf format on this page. Enjoy!
Elsewhere on Bondage Blog:
Fascinating article. The demise of “Secret Magazine” is probably attributable to the ease with which the Internet allows the spread of visual imagery, and the difficulty of enforcing copyright. Still not sure what can or should be done about that. It’s great that the Internet has allowed more writers and artists to effectively self publish, such as ourselves, but as you observed in another column, it makes hobbyists of most or all of us.