Reference material
So You Want to Publish a Magazine?
Chapter 06. Getting it out there
• You can use a professional distribution company, or distribute yourself. The difference being if you choose to distribute yourself, a lot of time is taken up contacting/chasing the clients and retailers which sell your magazines. Time is often better spent working on the magazines themselves and hiring a distributor.
• It is your distributor’s job to promote your title to the right retailers, monitor and adjust supply according to demand, and collect payment for you from retailers. You will get a percentage of the cover price for any copies sold in this way. Some distributors offer fixed percentages, others will negotiate. Depending on the deal, you can expect to earn about 30– 50 per cent of the cover price after a cut has been taken by the retailer and the distributor. This varies from distributor to distributor, and your bargaining power depends on your size; the smaller your print run, the less earning power, and thus bargaining power, you have.
• Keep talking to your distributor. A good, helpful one will tailor its service to your needs, but take it upon yourself to keep the channels of communication open, asking for feedback on sales figures and for advice on maximizing efficiency. As an independent title, one of your selling points is quality, which means high production values; unsold copies, therefore, are not only heartbreaking but also deeply inefficient. Copies of your magazine that are unsold by retailers will either be sent back to be pulped or have their covers ripped off (as proof of unsold numbers, on which the retailer will get a refund).
• Don’t forget to budget for the cost of sending your magazines to the distributor. You’ll have to cover that yourself, or arrange it with your printer, who will charge a fee to deliver to specified addresses. Once the distributor has your consignment of copies, it should take care of the cost of shipping to retailers.
• Sale or return means that you send your magazines to the retailer and, after an agreed period, they will pay you for copies sold and return any unsold copies. ‘On consignment’ essentially means the same thing. You supply copies of your magazine to the retailer, which sells them on your behalf. You can then invoice, at a pre-agreed price, for copies sold. Discounting, which is expected by retailers, means that you sell your copies to them at a discount. This is negotiable, but magazines are usually sold to retailers at a discount of 25– 30 per cent (meaning a considerably better cut for you than you get using a distributor). Don’t forget, when costing your options, that you need to factor in the cost of shipping copies to retailers. This can get expensive when you’re sending large packets overseas, so do your research.
Chapter 08. Money talks
• Your main financial outlay as a magazine will be the printing and paper costs for each issue. (See Chapter 9 for information on specifying your magazine with a printer.) Depending on how you intend to sell your magazine, you’ll need to work out how long it will take you to get revenue from copy sales. (See Chapter 6 on distribution and selling.) You will need enough cash upfront to cover the printing, paper and postage of your first issue, and probably the second issue, too. The next main cost to consider is creating the content of your magazine. Even the greats like i-D started at a kitchen table, printed on a photocopier and stapled by hand. But vivid, well-produced content can beget a classic title. Your editorial budget will depend on what type of magazine you are, and whether you are a one-person enterprise, have an in-house team, or employ freelance contributors for writing, proofreading, photography, illustration and the design of the magazine. Can you do some of these yourself and call in favours, or do you need a budget for all these services and contributors?
• Costing checklist: print and paper, editorial budget (writing, design, proofreading, illustration, photography), postage and or fulfilment (sending magazines to individual customers, delivery to warehouse or distributor, staff wages, overheads (studio/office, bills).
Chapter 09. Launch and beyond
• Your main financial outlay as a magazine will be the printing and paper costs for each issue. If you don’t have much money upfront, there is no harm in starting small. Using an on-demand device like Newspaper Club to make a modest newsprint edition that you send to key people and sell online alongside your blog content is a cheap way to get your name out there and begin to attract a readership. Cereal magazine started small, printing 1,500 copies of volume 1 in December 2012, but by December 2014 it had grown to the point of selling 25,000 copies worldwide. ‘We made a huge list of shops around the world that I really wanted to be in, and I just started calling them,’ explains Rosa Park. ‘We ended up selling all 1,500 copies within our first month, so I printed another 1,500.’ Consulting a distributor and key retailers can help you to decide your initial print run. Treat issue 1 as a pilot, test the response and build on it.
• Use every tool you have to promote a new issue. Social media can drive traffic to your online shop, but Will Hudson of INT Works and Printed Pages believes that nothing beats a newsletter: ‘No matter the power of social media, a newsletter is where we get spikes in sales,’ he says. ‘It’s amazing how you can tweet about something, you can Facebook it, but the minute you put something in people’s inboxes saying “This has launched, click here to buy it now,” that’s when you still see the highest traction.’
Chapter 10. Growing up
• Use every tIn your first year or two, it will be an achievement just to be making enough sales, gradually increasing your readership and managing your cash flow well enough for each issue of the magazine to pay for the next one. But if and when you get to the stage where you’re showing a profit, it will be time to make some decisions. Perhaps you’ll invest everything straight back into creating content. Do you want to expand – use the funds to increase your print run, send out a batch of promotional copies to potential advertisers, hold events to promote the magazine and generate new revenue streams, even invest in office space or better equipment for the space you have? Or do you want to keep some of that profit and finally take a holiday, or pay yourself a bit for the Herculean time and effort you’ve invested? If you’ve survived the first year or two and managed to make the magazine pay for itself, you’re already doing brilliantly. The title has a good reputation, your content is getting attention and the design has hit its stride. People in your industry and your target readership are taking an interest and buying your mag. You have something with weight, but the question now is how to turn that hard work and the respect you’ve earned into a sustainable financial future.
• Once your magazine has hit its stride, you can start to indulge the ideas part of your brain and broaden your business. Events, new products and publications that complement what you already do can add to your revenue streams and help you towards sustainability and profit. You might also expand your editorial in different directions by offering services as a creative agency, or set up a shop or other sideline. The key is to stay true to what you’re good at and know what your readership and therefore your market will go for. Wrap magazine is a great example: this illustration magazine built up credibility and a great roster of contributors in its early years, then translated these into a shop, selling its own products and those of the makers and illustrators who contributed to the magazine.
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