“GOT DIESEL, MAN?”…THE MUSCLE MAG THAT NEVER WAS
“GOT DIESEL, MAN?”…OUT OF GAS & OUT OF PRINT
Down The Road To Magazine Publishing in a Ride That Won’t Crank Up
Hasn’t everyone dreamed of launching his or her own magazine?
Assuming the role of the high-powered Editor-in-Chief; selecting the editorial and images you want the world to consume; mass-producing your vision; delivering insight and information…ending up on the coffee tables and toilet-side stashes of millions of readers?
I once had that dream…to rattle the racks with my own rag.
Enter DIESELman, a fitness and bodybuilding magazine I conceived in 2004. The tagline: “Where fast-lane guys fuel up.” The concept: a hip health mag that feels like a music mag. It would be Rolling Stone meets Muscle & Fitness. VIBE meets Men’s Fitness.
Initially, from a marketing standpoint, I preferred the power and simplicity of the single-word title: DIESEL. Boom! In your face. The slang term that had come to define a well-built physique.
However, at that time, my research turned up a trucking magazine out of Australia already sporting that moniker. Hey, it’s only fair. Diesel referred first to big-rig tanker trunks, not dudes built like them. So, I tacked on the extra word to the title to distinguish the men from the machines.
In hindsight, I chuckle. I took my ideas so seriously. (There would even be a spin-off for the ladies: DIESELdame or DIESELgirl. Yep, I hear you laughing, too.) I was determined to be “too cool for school,” knocking the mainstream muscle mags off their pedestals by playing their game with a tad more “flavor.”
DIESELman would be “glossy but bossy.” Not necessarily sick, still slick. Not necessarily hardcore, just edgy. Besides, all muscleheads know that, to this day, another longstanding magazine has the market cornered on sick, super-edgy, hardcore muscle mags. More power to ‘em.
Alas, I briefly pitched my concept to a few publishers (willing to listen) to no avail. The pursuit, interest or support never really cranked up. There was no rocket fuel to launch it our of the starting gate.
The unforgiving publishing industry takes no chances. It launches very few magazines to begin with, and it quickly kills off new, independent publications as soon as they hit the shelves. The fitness-magazine segment is notorious for this phenomenon and “cranks out casualties of the cover wars” every hour on the hour.
This reality leaves many with dreams of speeding down the magazine superhighway in a runaway success made of glossy paper out of gas, out of luck, and out of print.
So, there I was, stuck on the roadside, dream in my pocket, thumb out, waiting to hitch a ride back to reality. Eventually, a ride came along. I hopped inside and landed in, of all places, Hollywood. Doesn’t get more “real” than that, right?
DIESELman is just one of many on a long list of ideas collecting dust on my shelf. Yes, there will be more. After all, the ideas never stop coming…and the dust never stops falling.
Andrew Oye
FITWRITER…Mighty Powerful Words
www.myspace.com/fitwriter
thefitwriter@gmail.com
