Allow us to introduce you to an exciting chapter in the Depth Magazine story: Depth Publishing!
Depth Publishing is an expansion of Depth Magazine’s ethos of respect and celebration of creative works. Alongside creating regular content of reviews, interviews, and features, we are proudly a publisher of physical books; publishing on behalf of musicians. With this new chapter, we are able to support passionate creatives in bringing works to life that might have otherwise stayed as unrealised dreams, such as notes buried in phones or journals.
Why books?
Our love of music and appreciation for its creators extends to a desire to craft keepsakes for music lovers like us! What else do our favourite lyricists think about life? What more do they have to express outside of the confines of a song or an album?
While a printed magazine may make sense for us (given our name), books feel most right to us. We’re especially excited about books that will be given pride of place, and be a precious and well-thumbed possession. Books with post-it notes or folded corners throughout. Books that you curl up with or spend a day escaping into. Books that make you feel things along with the author.
We’re also Depth! We’re all about attention to detail and not being rushed in any way. It makes more sense in terms of us and our brand to take the time to create something meaningful, which doesn’t suit deadlines and time constraints that exist when it comes to the creation and printing of magazines.
We’ve always ‘gone deep’ in our fascination for the creative mind, and are now very proudly establishing a stronger platform for our favourite creative minds.
A business model with meaning
We’ve seen our fair share of financially struggling musicians, let alone struggling writers, photographers, artists. It’s a bitter pill to swallow when you learn that the creator of that brilliantly life-changing album that you adore can’t afford their rent this month.
Similarly, it might also surprise you to learn that the stunning photographic and journalistic pieces we’ve shared on Depth over our duration have been voluntary. Though we’ve never wanted to be financially swayed in the writing of opinion pieces, nor wanted to send musicians broke in the process of bringing their art to the world, we’ve always believed that our creatives have deserved to be financially rewarded. Despite this belief, it has taken thought and effort to establish a means for this that we are comfortable in and are in moral agreement of.
You might notice that even substantially sized media corporations have donation links or require readers to pay to view articles after a certain amount of visits. Paywalls, subscription models, and websites littered with advertising never sat well with us as a way to make Depth a sustainable and thriving business, but we were very keen to do something!
In an attempt to ‘be the change’, it is a soul-satisfying pleasure to establish a means to directly support these creative beings, as well as establishing a means to attempt to support the collective of creatives that run Depth. The music, the words, the emotion, the feeling – they are what matter most. We never want to see this lost or watered down. We never want to cut corners, or diminish the importance of authentic and rich content.
Love for music that you can hold in your hands
When searching for a business model for Depth, it felt really right to have something physical to exchange with the people who believe in what we do; literally, to have something to sell, and things we wholeheartedly believe in. As our brand is words, emotions, honouring creative people, and music, books written by musicians were an easy and natural extension of that!
We intend for our books to be available in print only at this stage. We love immersion into other worlds and romanticise the experience of reading these notes from someone’s heart and being attentively received by another. There’s something undeniably real about paper books in hand, with the turn of the page and the tactile experience being as special as soaking in the energy of the writing.
Our first author
We’ve revealed that our first book is Permanent Swim, authored by Matthew Gravolin, the former guitarist of Hellions. Matthew’s words in particular, with their unfiltered presentation of the human experience, feel deserving of this presence in being taken in via print. We couldn’t be happier to have one of our favourite lyricists and writers be our very first author. It’s an honour to bring Matthew’s words to the world.
Hellions lyrics have touched hearts when sung in cars or living rooms, and connected souls in festival settings. Careless scrolling of an ebook or PDF isn’t a match for this importance, and would be a missed opportunity of something special.
We’ve also had the pleasure of sharing Matthew Gravolin’s second book of poetry to the world. All’s Well That Ends. is flying out into the world, bringing Matt’s perspective on loss, love, and change.
We’ll looking forward to what the Depth Publishing adventure brings, and we hope you’ll love our books as much as we do! Given our tiny team, we don’t have a separate social media account for the publishing, so be sure to follow Depth Magazine on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to hear book updates as they happen!