History of PAM Deal (was Re: [AGA-mcm] Re: [AGA-sc] Dave & PAM)

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

On Sat, 26 Feb 2005, David Lass wrote:

> I would like to remind you that the reason all we did was buy the magazines 
> was that we did not want to get into any pickle of being liable for any 
> monies that Dave owed to authors etc. If we do get the rights to put PAMs 
> onto CDs and sell them we should be very careful that we in no way assume any 
> obligation of PAM.

Thanks for this reminder David...

This issue about more author pay has been worrying me ever since Karen
posted about it being not legal to reproduce given author's contracts and 
such.  I know, odds are that no authors are going to really come after us, 
but TAG is very clear that we reprint ad infinitum and don't pay authors 
at all.

Karen, you were one of those authors.  Do you remember anything about the 
arrangement for WRITING for PAM?  Did it say anything about reprints, or 
have any limitations to the first print run?

---- The casual reader may stop now.  The rest of this post is more 
history and detail than anyone other than Scott will enjoy reading. 
And maybe in Mike's History of the Planted Hobby 1991-2009 Book, this 
will show up right next to the page on the Novak case----

I had forgotten several details of this deal and the events leading up to 
it (as one is wont to do after three years of recovery).  I 
unintentionally reconstructed its anatomy while digging through the 
archives for the contract a week ago.

Gomberg had pushed the PAM "Franchise" on the AGA several times throughout 
its run.  He apparently first tried to make some kind of power play for 
TAG during Neil's editorship, and when unsuccesful, left the organization 
to start PAM.  Then he tried to get the AGA to carry PAM as its magazine 
(with four pages for AGA business in the middle).  Finally, as his 
interest waned, he tried to get the AGA to buy him out and take over 
publishing PAM as the AGA's official magazine.  By this point (end of 
2001), we figured we could do just as good a job by starting on our own 
with a color TAG.  Besides, if we took over publishing PAM, as David 
recalls above, we would inherit all Dave's debt, "deals", etc.

What we DID want to do, though, was pick up some new members, as our 
membership was not enough to support color printing.  And we were pretty 
horrified at Dave's "deal" with his subscribers, many of whom had been 
forced into multi-year committments, which was to give them one *back 
issue* for every remaining issue on their subscription.  We thought that 
an honorable thing for the AGA to do would be to step in and offer AGA 
memberships to all the PAM subscribers.

It went through, I beleive, both me and David as negotiators, possibly 
also Neil in there as well.  Just like today, I think I got too frustrated 
to continue with all the "dealing".  Originally we were just going to do 
the member conversion thing in swap for an equal number of back issues. 
At one point it was going to be "just the non-AGA members", but some of us 
thought it would be unfair to those who were already AGA (most, it turned 
out, were).  We didn't know it, but it turned out to be about 1000-1500 
copies right there (he had somewhere around 200 members with varying 
amounts of issues left).

As an afterthought, we thought of also buying some of the issues outright 
at $2 per copy, so we'd have a strong stock to sell out of the bookstore.
But that mutated into "we should buy his entire stock"... and I beleive 
I was partly resposible for this, as there was worry that he'd try to 
undercut us in back issue sales.  I think we'd also thought we could work 
a better deal for the entire stock than for just a thousand or two copies.

But somehow this ended up in the contract as "buy out his entire stock at 
$2 per copy."  I'll give Neil credit, he tried to stop it at that point. 
But at the time we had this huge treasaury and we just did it anyway.  A 
year later printing color TAG without ads, and with a money-losing 
convention in Houston, and only $1000 in revenue from PAMs, it started to 
dawn on us that this might have not been such a smart move.

Why bother regurgitating all this?  The whole problem with this latest 
debacle was that I'd FORGOTTEN a lot of the history.  When I was scanning 
in the issues for my own personal archive, I thought, "Hey, these articles 
are really good.  This was a pretty good magazine.  We should include 
those out-of-print articles in our disk & put everything in the index to 
remind folks that there's good info out there."  If I'd read my own post 
above, I would have remembered to keep a safe distance from it...still 
unexploded mines left around.

  - Erik

--
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com
_______________________________________________
AGA-mcm mailing list
AGA-mcm@thekrib.com
http://lists.thekrib.com/mailman/listinfo/aga-mcm