Mike and I attended MagNet last week, a national conference for the Canadian magazine industry. On one day we sat in on sessions about the Canada Periodical Fund and about Canada Post, but we didn’t learn much that was new or helpful to us. That’s partly thanks to the Independent Publishers’ Association of Ontario, which we are part of, and which had a meeting recently about the changes to the federal periodical fund.
    I think there’s value in attending a professional development seminar even when you don’t learn anything new, if only so that you get confirmation that your knowledge is current.
    The next day we attended sessions that were jam-packed with new ideas and information. I went to “Circulation Solutions on a Small Budget” by Faith Drinnan, Mike attended “The Fundamentals of Advertising Sales” by Gwen Dunant and we both heard “Small Magazine Creative Marketing Solutions” discussed by three panellists.
    While we scribbled down plenty of notes from these sessions, a strong sense that remains is that people seem to be impressed by Escarpment Views. Thanks to Mike’s fearlessness in handing out copies of our summer issue, lots of people talked to us about the magazine. An editor I’ve known for a long time said she envies us for starting our own magazine that’s a success! One of the panellists even held up a copy saying that we’re doing a lot of neat things, and then used it as an example of ways to try to get advertisers to take bigger spaces. The fact that we have already tried the techniques he mentioned was not as important as the promotion and recognition he gave us. He wouldn’t have used Escarpment Views as an example if it was poor.
    I was exhausted by two solid days of meeting people and taking in information but MagNet was definitely worth going to. Now the challenge is to actually implement the many good ideas we were given.
    What conferences have you found helpful and why?
If you liked this post you may want to read “Celebrating Two Years of Publishing Escarpment Views!”Â
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