There’s a reason why they call it “Do It Yourself.” Ending a year of hell with my now-ex-business partner and legal trouble with the company we hired to sell our ads, I had re-learned that valuable lesson the punk world lives by. Flying solo once again, I went back to using inside advertising sales reps and associate editors, and dumped the idea of hiring people 500 to 3,000 miles away that I couldn’t keep an eye on. It just meant that we would have to work twice as hard, since we didn’t have the money to travel and the phone had now become our most important tool in the office (remember, this was 1992, before e-mail.)

AP was now being run by a very talented group of people that worked around the clock to put together what was turning into one of the country’s premiere alternative-rock magazines. With all the negative energy that had been flying around the year before now gone, we were working together as a team, with the same mindset. No two of us were in major disagreement about the direction we were taking the magazine, and it was the first time I felt completely comfortable letting go of the editorial and photographic strings. (I still nitpicked at times. All of us publishers have a little micromanagement down deep inside.)

While half the office (actually a two-bedroom apartment) worked on creating AP, Dawn Burns and I worked on distributing it. Realistically, we knew we had maxed out our book- and record-store distribution, and if we were going to grow further, we were going to have to get into supermarkets and drugstores (also known as newsstand distribution).

Here’s how that works: All small publishers hit a point in their magazine’s lifespan where, due to advertiser pressure, they have to increase their circulation substantially to get access to bigger advertising accounts (like clothing, liquor, electronics, etc.) This happens all the time, and AP was no different.

Ultimately what happens is that small publishers start negotiating with a national newsstand distributor to help them increase their circulation beyond the bookstores into supermarkets, newsstands at airports, Wal-Mart and so on. These distributors routinely give these sales talks to small publishers, making us think they can guarantee that our magazine will sell in every store in the U.S., and us, being naïve and desperate to increase our circulation, fall for it.

Now the big mistake we small publishers make is thinking that all of our titles belong (and, more importantly, will actually sell) in all these major retail accounts nationwide, regardless of regionalism or demographics. I’m really sorry to say, but a magazine that caters to raver kids is just not going to sell in convenience stores. It’s just not going to happen, no matter how much you wish it would or how much you want to conince the advertising reps at Volkswagen of that.

What happens is that because 15 copies out of every 100 distributed sells, the distributor sends no money to the publisher, and the publisher-after receiving the sales reports showing how few copies actually sold-ends up owing the printer a ton of money. Over the past 19 years of doing AP, I have seen this exact scenario kill more publications than I can count on my hands and feet. It nearly killed AP as well.

We kept putting our indie-cred bands like the Jesus Lizard and so forth on the cover, figuring it would sell like crazy to all these people who had never seen AP before. No such luck. Within six months of being distributed to major newsstand accounts, we saw our finances go from the five-figure blacks to six-figure reds. We walked into 1993 with a shitload of money owed to our printer, and me having sleepless nights again.

The cold, hard reality is that cool bands on the cover don’t necessarily sell magazines, and that was something we would struggle with over the next five years.

We were constantly cash-strapped and 90-plus days out on paying our bills. Funnily enough, we weren’t freaking out that bad. That Christmas, when we threw our holiday office party, I got everyone their first-ever AP sweatshirts. It doesn’t seem like much now, but back then it meant a lot-especially after what we had been going through.