How to make a magazine: Part 1 of a 6,137 part series

Continuing our series, we rejoin our series, which is already in progress...

Here's a good question: why does Beyond cost $12 plus shipping when those other magazines only cost $4.95? Or $3.99? Or sometimes even $1.97?

Here's a good answer: Because.

Ok, that's not so good. Here's a better answer: It's the economics of publishing. No, wait, come back! Come back! It's actually a pretty interesting story. There may even be a dragon. Here we go...

There are lots of different ways to make a magazine. One way is to put content together, sell some ads, and then sell the magazine to a whole lot of people (a mass market). This kind of magazine typically sells for much less than it costs to produce it - less sometimes than a cup of coffee or a birthday card.

How do they do it? Well, they sell at a low price in order to collect reader eyeballs (in a jar! we know they keep them in a jar!) so they can get advertising revenues that allow them to make a profit. They'll sometimes even spend more to GET a subscriber (and his or her eyeballs) than the cost of the subscription itself - because the loss is offset by ad revenue. (The average cost for launching this kind of magazine is now in the tens of millions based on reaching around a million readers.)

Another way to make a magazine (that, not incidentally, costs less than many millions and reaches less than a million people) is to put the content together, forgo the ads, and sell the magazine for close to what it actually costs to produce to a smaller community of readers. This is how Beyond operates.

We're an ads-free, not-for-profit, reader-supported publication. The no-ads part allows us to treat Beyond as an art object - a beautiful piece of papercraft that exists without commercial interruption.

So why does it cost $12? Because of the choices we're making - choices about the paper we print on, the artists we work with, the way we design our pages. Most importantly, because we're ads-free, we don't use advertising revenues to offset our costs (see Questions From the Curious on why we decided to forgo ads in the first place).

In short, for a whole host of reasons - more of which we'll explain in the coming weeks - alternative, independent media in magazine form can cost more than most of us are used to. But we believe it's worth doing. So hop on your dragon (we had to get that into the story somehow) and visit the Beyond shop to see what we're going on about.