The print in the July 2005 sixth edition of teen monthly Gogirl! was barely legible.

The Jakarta-based magazine phoned the marketing director of the printing house to say the magazine would no longer use its services.

Gogirl! managers had already been upset with the loose binding for edition 4 and the way the readers' bonus was packaged in edition 5. The production director of the print works threatened to sue for breach of contract.

'Go ahead. Count the remaining contractual obligation we have to pay. Subtract it from the amount of loss you caused to Gogirl! Figure out what the difference is and see who has to pay whom,' Nina Moran, the magazine's business director snapped.

The printers were at a loss for words not only because Nina challenged them but also because she already calculated that they owed Gogirl! hundreds of millions of rupiah, more than the amount the magazine was still required to pay under the contract.

Nina relates this confrontation in page 47 of No One to Someone: the Story of Gogirl! Magazine and Friends.

The new book is an account of the multitude of mishaps and the tenacity to overcome the trials of the magazine Nina co-founded with her two younger sisters, Anita and Githa.  

The three sisters have been magazine buffs since childhood. 'We are magazine freaks to the core.' They found something was missing in girl magazines catering for the 14 to 22 age segment. The mags did not raise serious current issues.

To address that, Gogirl!'s July 2013 edition, for instance, has an article on discrimination in Indonesia titled 'Stop discrimination!' It features Jakarta Deputy Governor Basuki 'Ahok' Tjahaja Purnama, a high-profile anti-discrimination campaigner of Chinese parentage.  

In 2004, Nina conducted a survey on the magazine scene and drafted a 150-page proposal. She went from bank to bank to try and procure a 1.3 billion rupiah start-up loan.  
No bank would lend to a 25-year-old fresh college graduate with no track record in magazine publishing.  

Nina's father, an apparels trader, read the proposal and saw potential. He pledged to invest only after Nina ran the bank-loan gauntlet.

The tribulations did not stop with Nina's efforts to secure her seed money. She learnt the print media agent is a costly key to the mass distribution of newspapers and magazines to the Indonesian public. Agents take up to 45 percent of the retail price of the magazine as their cut. So if Gogirl! costs the consumer Rp 27,500, the agent's fee is nearly half of that. Subtract the printing and bonus costs from the remaining 55 percent and the magazine publisher's share of the sale is only 15 percent.

Cash flow becomes a problem when agents delay payments to the publisher by up to a year. Delayed payments are due to late payments from newsstand retailers to sub-agents who in turn pay the agents late.  In addition, bad agents do not pay in full if at all.

Thus cash for office space, salaries, supplies and operations must come from ads. Gogirl!'s handicap to begin with was that it had no rating in the Nielsen Media Research Report, the holy book of ad agencies. Nielsen would only give a rating after an outlet has had a two-year run.

Nina describes in the book her starting pitch to get corporate customers, the business term for advertisers, at the launch of the inaugural February 2005 issue.

Through a key launch lunch guest, Nina got contacts of all the influential people in the surfing industry in Bali. She set up meetings with 10 surfing brands as soon as she got off the plane in Denpasar. She returned to Jakarta with 10 advertising contracts. Each brand signed up for 12 months.  

The book deals mainly with the business side of the magazine where Nina has unassailable control. She narrates the magazine's relations with the banks, printers, agents, advertisers, staff and most importantly the loyal readers, the Gogirl! tribe.  It has one chapter on the haters who dismissed Gogirl! with a four-month life span.

Little is explained, however, about the magazine's content, the domain of Anita, the chief editor.  Also a mainstay element of the magazine is the fashion and beauty section, which Githa is responsible for.  

What the book does have are interviews with 10 successful female entrepreneurs that girls can emulate. Inspiring, motivating and enlightening are the magazine's credos.

Gogirl! tells its tribe members to ignore all ridicule and naysayers who suppose their dreams are too incredible to accomplish (page 97).  The mag caters to girls in the junior high school to high school category. It aims for Indonesian girls to be creative, smart and stylish.

All Gogirl! editions have a full-face image of a usually Western sassy cover-girl on the front cover. Headlines are in English. The body text is not standard Indonesian that conforms to correct grammar but is in juvenile street speech.

The book is replete with photos of the three Gogirl! ladies. Their pictures in numerous events, from cradling a baby to beaming on stage for a business excellence award, make the book appear like a scrapbook.

Without an account on content, No One to Someone is incomplete. Anita could write her own volume on her editorship. Githa can have her own title on trendy fashion and fashionistas.

Nonetheless the book tells the story of a girls' magazine that has found a niche that gives space for girls to dream in and strive to make it real.

No One to Someone
By Nina Moran,
B first, 2013
193 pages

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