By Ruth Addicott
A title devoted to yoga is due to be launched this week by the publisher who was behind a magazine for chocoholics.
Yoga magazine will be published monthly by Mind, Body & Spirit and will target beginners and experts.
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Arthur Martin, who runs the company Food Press, is editor-in-chief, yoga expert and lawyer Ali Malik is editor and Sandra Grant, another yoga practitioner, is deputy editor.
The 100-page title will be full colour and will launch with a print run of 35,000. Copies will be sold in the UK for £2.95, as well as in parts of New Zealand and the US.
“We think there are over four million people doing yoga in the UK,” Martin told Press Gazette. “Seventy per cent of them are female, but we have tried not to alienate anyone. We know men are going to buy it as there are a lot of men involved in the business.”
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Martin added he had found it difficult to recruit journalists who not only had an understanding of yoga, but could also write about it. “Yoga is quite a complex subject because there are more than 100 different types,” he said.
“There are new styles coming out and we are trying to look at all aspects and produce a magazine that makes you say, ‘I want to try that’. We want to try to put some life into it and get through the muddle of the eastern approach, which a lot of people find difficult to identify with.”
He said yoga had increased in popularity due to celebrities such as Madonna and Geri Halliwell, who have made it much more approachable.
The first issue contains a post-Christmas body-boost work-out courtesy of Halliwell’s yoga coach and the “mountain pose”, as well as reflexology, yoga to cure the common cold, yoga for babies – and tantric sex. Each issue will feature a “guru of the month” and “pose of the month” plus fashion and local yoga listings.
Martin is also known in the industry for being behind the launch of Chocolate Magazine, a title aimed at chocoholics. The title was suspended last April, but he said he was hoping to revive it again this year.
Explaining its disappearance, he quipped: “The editor ate so much chocolate his teeth fell out and he had to re-build his gums.”
Ruth Addicott
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