Behind the scenes: Cercle magazine

This June the French magazine Cercle was translated into English for the first time. Co-published by Hong Kong’s IdN, the release is part of the imprint IdN extra, a series of special editions that explore one particular theme in depth.

Each issue of Cercle mixes scientific enquiry and artistic reflection to fully understand its subject, with this issue devoted to exploring the insect world. We spoke to the team, Marie Secher, Maxime Pintadu and Marlène Astrié, to find out how they work and where they’re at with their next issue.

Each of your issues are centred around one specific topic. What’s the process of picking the theme?
We always start out with brainstorming among the three of us, just throwing ideas around. It’s a challenge finding a topic that is broad enough to fill an entire magazine, but also narrow enough so that we can cover it from different angles. We always do loads of research into the topics, and we usually realise that there’s way more to the field than we imagined.

Also, the three of us being an illustrator, an art director and a graphic designer, we try to come up with topics that we think will be fun and interesting to work with visually. Our first issue was about the forest. For the second issue we did the complete opposite, science fiction. And now, with insects, it’s kind of in between.

With all three of you coming from design, how have you found the editorial side to magazine publishing?
It’s definitely a challenge, but we’re learning. We stick to the interview format because then it’s really just a record of our conversations. It’s the people we talk to who are the experts, so we try to give them room to talk about their field. Some of the topics are very complex and we really don’t want to make mistakes so we do huge amounts of research to make sure we know what our interviewees are talking about. And we always go back to talk with them two or three times to elaborate on things and dig deeper.

Your contract with IdN is for two issues – have you started making the next one? Can you reveal the topic?
Yes! We’re quite excited for the theme, it’s costumes. We’re just about to start producing it, and this week we’re meeting a Parisian bespoke tailor, a costume designer, and an expert on traditional costumes.

Cercle is currently ad-free, is that a deliberate choice?
It’s not really by choice, but it’s complicated. On the one hand, we’re happy about it, but at the same time, we do need the money. It’s a challenge when you only publish once a year, and since each issue covers a different field, it’s even harder. But we’re hoping that the costume issue could bring in some advertisers. We’re working on a new strategy which includes partnering with brands, but it needs to be right. It’s very important that we share the same values and attitudes so we’re extremely picky.

Looking past the next issue, what does the future hold for Cercle?
First of all, we would love to be able to prolong our contract with IdN and to continue publishing in English. Having gained a small community of non-French-speaking readers, it would be a shame not being able to offer them anything.

Eventually, it all comes down to money – we would need to cover translation and printing costs for an English edition. For our first issue, we experimented with making Cercle bilingual, but we didn’t figure out a way of doing it that we liked.

Additionally, we’re planning on increasing the frequency so that Cercle is published on a biannual basis, and we want to start a blog where we can post things in between issues.

Apart from Cercle, we’re also thinking of building a French online platform for independent publishing. Independent magazines aren’t too common in France yet, and we would love to open French peoples’ eyes to the wonderful world of independent publishing.

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