How to Publish a Magazine

Your Guide to Becoming a Successful Magazine Publisher and Make it Big in the Media World

Publishing, at its core, is a pretty simple business to understand. You create a vehicle – your publication – through which to entertain, inform, educate or provoke people. If enough of the people you’re entertaining, informing, educating or provoking are coming back for more on a regular basis then you have the opportunity to A) Charge them for the pleasure or B) Charge companies for the chance to tap into your readership with commercial messages. You can (and should) even do both. All very straight forward stuff.

So if publishing is such a simple game, how come so many new publications crash and burn before they even get going? Again, nothing too complex when analysing the reasons for failing in publishing, especially magazine publishing. Magazines can burn cash at quite an eye-watering speed.

As the ambitious publisher draws up his or her ideas for world domination of the magazine market only to realise that gathering lots of readers is hard and expensive and not having lots of readers tends to put off the big advertisers they’d been hoping to bank roll the publication in its formative stage.

Failure in publishing is common. The most frequent mistakes new (and in some cases, experienced) publishers make is to make assumptions that just never turn into reality. So you’re starting the best ever streetwear magazine known to mankind, let’s assume all of your streetwear loving friends will read, let’s assume WH Smiths will stock the title and let’s assume that Adidas, Nike and Reebok will be falling over themselves to advertise in your title. Sorry, when it comes to the crunch even your friends might let you down when you ask them to pay for your product let alone the big brands and the major stockists.

Here’s an explanation as to why the dream magazine success scenario rarely materialises.

1) You have the ideas for content. You read magazines and think to yourself, I can do better than this. You love the idea of being involved in the fast paced, glamorous world of magazine publishing and you’ve had your killer idea for a great magazine with an engaging title.

You know how you want it to look and you know who you think will read it. So the first thing you’ll need to do is find a designer to help you create your masterpiece. Problem number 1: Good designers are hard to come by and they’re not cheap. So you’ve two choices. You either decide to fund the designer or you seek a cheaper alternative. If you go for option 2, you’ll be dead in the water before you even get going.

Sorry. If you go for option 1, well done. Let’s move on.

2) We’re into costs now. Your designer is going to cost you money. Let’s say you’ve come up with the idea for a 48 page magazine (assuming you’ve done your research and have analyses how many pages are going to be the most cost effective for you). Are you going to launch a monthly? Yes? Well in that case, we’d better move quickly to ensure we get our first edition ready and a good portion of the second edition as well (you can’t run a monthly without making sure you get well ahead of yourself with editorial, designs, content etc).

So you have your designer work on a mock up for your magazine so you can start pitching to the advertisers who you hope are going to give you the initial cash you need to get going. We’re now officially in business.

3) Your designer has come up with a brilliant mock up. Your logo looks great and you’re ready to start asking for appointments with media buyers. Let’s just pause for a moment though. You trademarked your magazine’s name, right? Yes we’ve just spent some more money and it’s taken a while but you have to make sure you’re not going to end up launching a title that someone else can put out of business with one phone call to a trademark lawyer. So we’ve got a design, a protected name and a belly load of enthusiasm. It’s time to start talking to our advertisers.

4) You’ll be attempting to set up meetings with the main players in the commercial world who you believe will benefit from being in your magazine. The first thing you’ll notice is that the big brands of the world don’t book their own advertising, they use media buying agencies who do it on their behalf. A media buyer is a skilled professional who specialises in getting the best deals on behalf of their clients. You know for sure that you’re offering a great deal and that the big brands you’ve seen on TV will want in.

The media buyer will ask you a couple of questions. 1) What’s your circulation? 2) Can I see 3 of your most recent copies? Oh dear. We don’t have any circulation yet as this is as launch which is also why we can’t send three recent editions. Oh dear again. The media buyer will politely let you know that big brands do not like the idea of risking their image in a magazine which has not come out yet and may in fact end up failing quite quickly.

At this point you might make the case that of course the magazine is likely to fail if the advertisers won’t back it. The media buyer, whilst sympathetic, will pass up on the opportunity for now and ask you to call back in three issues time. The big brands you were relying on are now out of the mix.

5) Smaller advertisers are what you need. People who run their own businesses and make their own marketing decisions. You’ll pitch them your mock up and you’ll get your early cash flow from this source, you declare. It’s certainly true that the smaller businesses have more, if not total, say over where they spend their ad budgets but you’ll very quickly find that it is exactly because they make the decisions as to where to spend their own money it can be a very, very difficult process getting them to actually spend it at all.

They’ll be equally cautious about advertising in a launch magazine as the bigger brands for many of the same reasons and you may find your enthusiasm dwindling fast.

6) So let’s say your fantastic sales skills win through and you get your advertisers on board. Of course it’s very likely that they won’t have actually given you any cash yet but are committed to paying you upon publication of the magazine or 30 days after. So now where’s this magazine going and how are we going to tell people about it? If it’s a consumer magazine then we’ll be pitching it into the newstrade – the likes of WH Smiths, the supermarkets, independent newsagents and the like. Makes sense? Well, actually it’s not that easy to get titles into these places as you might think and do you know what, it’s actually going to cost YOU a LOT of money!

Here we were thinking that sales of our magazine would make up for the shortfall in advertising revenue when the big names didn’t come through for us when in actual fact, the newstrade is going to charge us (a lot) for the privilege of selling our magazine. In an imaginary scenario where your title is stocked in WH Smiths, the major supermarkets and independent news retailers it’s an absolute business certainty that you’d have had to have spent well over £20k just to the magazines into those places.

Let’s dream a little more and imagine that our magazine sold well at £2.95 per issue. Of all the magazines you place on the newsstand, unless you have a huge marketing budget getting anywhere over 25% sales efficiency is good going. So for every thousand magazines you pay to have printed and distributed, you’ll be doing well to sell 250. And of those 250, you’ll receive little more than 40 to 45% of the cover price.

Which means, when you get the calculator out, for your £20k investment in placing your magazines on the newsstand you’re going to need to sell more than 15,000 copies to break even. To sell 15,000 copies you’re going to have to place at least 60,000 copies on the newsstand. Any idea how much 60,000 copies is going to cost to have printed? I’ll suggest you’ll be looking at the thin end of another £20k give or take a few pounds.

So it’s easy to how costs can easily scupper a well intentioned magazine. But hang on, if it’s that hard how come anyone ever succeeds? Some publishers do succeed, right?

Indeed they do. Successful publishers tend to do very nicely for themselves. Just look at Felix Dennis, an incredibly successful publisher worth more than £400m. Richard Desmond, David Sullivan, Michael Heseltine, Hugh Hefner, Malcolm Forbes to name but a few, all have become very, very rich indeed through magazines. When it’s done well, magazine publishing is not only one of the most fulfilling professional lifestyles, it’s also one of the most financially rewarding.

Successful magazine publishing offers more than just big money

The image you may have of a high flying magazine publisher, working late into the night on tight deadlines, wining and dining big advertising clients, networking with the great and the good in high society, travelling to interesting places, writing and reviewing the most exciting new products before they even reach the general public and generally living a lifestyle most people would envy AND getting paid for it, is actually probably not a million miles from the reality.

Notice I said ‘high flying’ magazine publisher? That means the ones who are successful and are sitting loftily at the top of a quality publication which has an established readership and prolific revenue streams. The successful magazine publishers of the world do indeed have a great job and rewarding career/lifestyle. They also tend to have another trait in common, they have all failed spectacularly at some point in their publishing careers. Publishing is a high risk/high reward business, no mistake.

Your aim, if you intend to become a magazine publisher, is to avoid those errors and simply leap straight to the success stage of the magazine publishing business.