Turf n' surf

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Feb 1, 1995 by Michael Kaplan

Age Wave: The Graying Boomer Surfer's Bible

Steve Pezman has been here since the beginning. A burly, gray-haired man in white Bermuda shorts, Pezman, 53, manages his suite of unpretentious offices with the hang-loose demeanor that suits a middleage man who's spent the better part of his life chasing the perfect wave and running magazines that chronicle the hunt.

He hands me a copy of his three-year-old Surfer's Journal, which is lavishly produced and printed on heavy stock--and carries only four to six pages of advertising in each issue. But Pezman doesn't care. he figures that there is a large enough (not to mention devoted) coterie of fortysomething surfers out there to support his quarterly at $12.95 per issue. "I'll run 11,000-word articles in my book," he says of the magazine that needs to sell 10,000 issues in order to be suitably profitable. "The typical editorial approach is to take an idea and condense it to its minimum. I take a small idea and expand it."

Such lengthy thought pieces are not Surfer and Surfing turf at all. "A lot of the baby boomers hang in with Surfer but feel totally alienated by Surfing," explains Pezman, who was publisher of Surfer from 1970 until 1991, when he launched Surfer's Joumal. "The latter is filled with kid slang and is the Tiger Beat of the field."

Pezman determined to strike out on his own when he turned 50 and realized that he had outgrown his then-employer, Surfer, After casting around for other possibilities, he decided to break ground on his own venture. Along with his wife, Debbee, who had worked on the business side of Surfer, Pezman invested a life savings of $300,000 in his enterprise.

Working with a profit margin that comes only from sales of the last 3,000 issues, Pezman makes a go of the magazine by running lean. "My wife and I each wear three or four hats," he says, adding that $100 covers the editorial cost of each page. "I do everything related to producing the magazine, and Debbee handles the entire business end. Two part-time people--an editorial assistant and photo researcher--come in to help us, but basically it's a very hands-on operation. We do our own marketing and distribution; the copies come to us on 13 skids and we slip them into envelopes ourselves. Sometimes my wife's sister will drop by to help, and the atmosphere is like a family quilting bee."

Pleasure that Pezman derives from his boutique magazine can be traced to what he calls "trimming the thorns of publishing's rose branch." He is referring to Surfer's Journals relative independence from newsstand distributors and advertisers. Those copies that are sold at retail, about 4,200 per issue, go through bookstores and surf shops--not traditional newsstands.

When Pezman contemplates the future of his magazine, he envisions its circulation topping out no higher than 25,000 in the United States. (Annual growth, as Surfer's Journal enters its fourth year next month, has been 35 percent.) However, he also believes that foreign markets hold promise. Already, the magazine is translated into French and sells 6,000 copies in that language. Pezman anticipates closing similar deals, in which he receives a quarterly royalty, in surf-crazed countries like Brazil and Japan.