Strong Words is an extraordinary magazine about books. Each edition runs to 84 pages and 45,000 words, including reviews of up to 35 new novels and volumes of non-fiction. This writing and reading is done, almost entirely, by one person.
“It is a seven-day-a-week job,” says Ed Needham, who edits and publishes Strong Words from a room in his west London house. “I worked out that it’s the equivalent of writing The Great Gatsby every issue and reading the equivalent of War and Peace every week.”
Such is Needham’s devotion to literature that he has followed this punishing schedule for six years and Strong Words has reached its 50th issue, which is testimony to the quality of the publication and the validity of its founding mission: to write about books in the engaging format of a popular magazine.
“To most people books are a fun activity that they escape into,” says Needham. “I feel they should be written about in the same tone. Good details, good trivia, good anecdotes and good turn of phrase.”
The latest Strong Words cover line – “The Story Behind the Greatest-Ever Haircut” – is a tease for a review of Me and Mr Jones, a book about David Bowie by Suzi Ronson, wife of guitarist Mick Ronson, and a former crimper who created the red mullet worn by Bowie for his Ziggy Stardust persona.
Elsewhere, the magazine is an entertaining journey through history, thrillers, memoirs and eccentric publishing, including a pictorial guide to Soviet bus stops – all with bold photo layouts and smart headlines.
Needham – who is supported part-time by designer Jonathan Sellers – is an eminent magazine journalist. For five years around the turn of the century he edited FHM, when it was the most popular title on the newsstand and shifted more than a million copies per issue. He later moved to New York and became managing editor of Rolling Stone.
His success with Strong Words is a lesson to the magazine industry, which has been ravaged by digital.
Whereas broadcast media has benefited from greater accessibility and portability on new audio and video platforms that make content available when and where you want it, magazines have had negligible uplift from tech. You rarely see anyone reading a mag on the train these days.
But Needham argues that, even in 2024, “people look forward to the thrill of magazines arriving through their letterbox”, and through word-of-mouth recommendations, he has built a sustainable business of several thousand subscriptions (£40 a year for six issues). Compare this success with the ongoing travails of many glossies, some with 50 staff on the masthead.
Book publishers must love a publication that is enthusiastic about all the titles it features, because Needham believes “there is no point in saying, ‘Don’t read this book’.”
Sure, there is #BookTok, where TikTok influencers recommend good reads. But social platforms cannot provide the depth that any self-respecting bookworm demands.
Newspaper book reviews are shrinking. Their online versions do not sit in literary walled gardens but among the distractions of the internet. As for older literary publications, Needham believes they are too scholarly and aloof.
“It’s language from the university seminar,” he says. In his latest Editor’s Letter, he slates a New Yorker pseud who muses on “the lazier hermeneutics of literary criticism” while reviewing James, a reworking of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Percival Everett. “I had no idea what they were talking about,” Needham complains.
The tone of voice of Strong Words is very much his own – unsurprisingly as he has written nearly all of its two million words. (“That’s about 50 The Great Gatsbys and three King James Bibles.”) His style is companionable and erudite.
Famous authors are impressed. Sebastian Faulks calls it a “must read”. Lisa Taddeo describes it as “not merely a magazine, but an infinitely wise and entertaining one”.
In reviewing poverty memoirs, Needham makes astute social commentary, giving the magazine a newsy feel. He has begun a new section called “Crime, Corruption & Investigation” to reflect societal trends. “The state of the world, especially Britain, is quite scandalous in many ways,” he says. “People are being overcharged, people are not paying their taxes, the government is not regulating industries where huge sums of money appear to be disappearing. People are writing very interesting books on this aspect of modern life and how corrupt and broken it is.”
In many ways, Strong Words is meeting a need. “The UK is the world’s most bookish country in that there are more books published per capita in the UK than anywhere else,” Needham points out. “But there are 200,000 books published every year in the UK and nobody can keep up with that.”
At least, they now have somewhere to start.