Well, I agree with you to a point. But I simply don't want "more books [martial arts] to be written not less." I want better books to be written, not the horrible stuff that largely fills the shelves in my local book stores. I buy books that I think (not "feel") are worth my money. Indiscriminate buying would, IMO, send the wrong message to publishing houses, viz. "this dreck sells, so we'll publish more of it!" Think if everyone bought "Classical Fighting Arts" instead of, say, "Black Belt"? (I would hate to see Dave Lowry's column go if BB ever folded, since it's generally the only thing worth reading in that rag, but he's a good enough author to survive that.) Market forces go into what gets produced. If people are willing to settle for "Black Belt" then they will eventually not even get a chance to buy "Classical Fighting Arts."
While TotallyTKD gets a qualified thumbs up from me publications geared towards Korean martial arts seem to suffer from a few common problems (and Totally TKD is not excepted from some of these):
Generally poor writing both in style and substance. I'm not a 4th grader and, in fact, my 4th grader has a better reading level than most of the articles I have seen in most MA magazines.
Closely related to this: horrendous editing. Seriously, do people think spell-check is the same as editing? I've edited several professionally published books and would be ashamed to have signed off on many of the articles I have read in various magazines.
The idea that an article consists of three pages asking someone who has spent decades in the martial arts incredibly shallow questions and settling for unbelievably shallow responses. Case in point: the most recent issue of TKDTimes with the "preview" of Dr. Kimm's Taekwon-Do history book elicited a resounding "Who cares?" after reading it. If that's the kind of "preview" they're going to give then the book doesn't deserve to sell (disclaimer: obviously the book deserves to sell, but I hope you get my point).
Becoming a house organ. We all have our own biases about things, whether well grounded or not, but there is something to be said about entertaining a different viewpoint from time to time without condescension.
Publication of articles and/or editorials that are belittling in tone towards styles/people/concepts with which they disagree. Critical thinking is one thing, being a boor is quite another.
If not adhering to the above problems results in a publication being killed then it deserves death. Those are the absolute minimum standards, IMO, that a good martial arts publication should meet. I have read more than enough magazines that fail on one or more of them (and, frankly, the writing "skill" is the worst offender for me personally; I just can't waste my time reading poorly written articles anymore). I'd like to think that producing a quality product would result in more people buying said product since it provides a good or service that people say they want.
Pax,
Chris
