Has anyone here ever started their own print magazine?
 

If so what were some of the downfalls?

What did you do that was a waste of money and what worked well for you etc??

Thanks

I cannot imagine why would someone want to start a print magazine nowadays. It's so expensive to print and a million other issues and problems arise depending on what kind of mag you are creating. Even if the creators have years of experience in the magazine industry and are very clever, most magazines fail anyway.

:1orglaugh:helpme:Oh crap

thanks for bringing my brain fart back to reality lol LMAO

Internet is taking over, its hard...

I was thinking about it for a while. My partner and I eventually thought it wouldn't be such a great idea.

Yeah I have an awesome idea on an untapped growing market

startup cost are not a problem but I dont want to go broke trying to make it fly. My main concern is ad sales as my magazine niche is very "questionable" sort of speak

My reasoning behind even giving this a thought over the past 6 months is that I figure that there are other like me who would prefer to sit down and read a good rag vs always surfing the internet

for some reason the net just dosent give me the same feel as reading a good magazine or book for that matter

also... the magazine industry has never seen the likes of my marketing power... i dont know

maybe someday

I guess my main issue is that I am trying to find something to do with my money for a backup as this gravy train will dry up sooner or later:(

Those two lines together make me chuckle. :winkwink:

Right on :thumbsup:1orglaugh

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

The downfalls are distribution. You'll pay $2 for printing and distributors offer you $2.25 per issue. If you do 10 million issues, well, it's not a problem. If not, you need to be sure you have a lot of paid advertising or offer your own products and make a killing.

I did some years ago, and although in retrospect it turned out to be worthwhile as a learning experience, I wouldn't do it again. Like someone said above, 'Why? There's the internet now.'

It was a Harley orientated monthly publication and actually showed a minuscule profit from day one, yet the time involved was brutal. A two-man operation, we did all the:

Layout and design
Wrote the articles and/or edited submissions
Photography
Ad sales
Majority of the distribution
Pre-print set ups
Promotion/ad trades with other publications

And that's just off the top of my head. Probably worked out to where we were making about 50 cents an hour and killing ourselves doing it. The only good part was we advertised our own products and events so there was that upside factor.

Overall, it wasn't worth it and this was long before the net.

I'd recommend that if you have a good concept, build it on the web. It'll be 10% of the cost and work of print and you'll have a ton more upside potential.

What Sebring said.

I worked for a mail order fetish video company back in the pre-internet days. We put out a couple of issues of a magazine. No advertising; we sold it for $14.95 an issue to our existing direct sales clients, and $7 an issue to adult video stores.

However, between writing all the articles, laying it all out, printing, binding and shipping it, the time put in just didn't pay off.

If you do go ahead & do one, I'd recommend doing themed, timeless issues instead of dating them. That way, you can still sell reprints of each issue for years instead of having it get stale.

I love print, but I don't think it's a responsibility that I'd take on again.

Have you considered testing the water with an online magazine in .pdf form? There are even a few pretty good flash interface systems out there. Zmags is one that takes adult.