How to Make a Magazine: The Myth of Bookstores

(Begin public service announcement)

When people ask, "Where can I find Beyond?" we usually say, "Right here." (Unless of course we happen to be in the pool and don't have a Beyond tucked in our water wings.)

Naturally, most people expect magazines to be at their local bookstores amidst hundreds of other magazines. But here's the problem. Unless you have a massive print run where you can afford to put thousands of magazines into bookstores, it can actually cost you to be distributed there.

Here's how it works:

First, you ship your magazine off to a distributor - if they'll take you. Distributors of course want to make money off of the titles they stock and prefer large (think of a 000,000,000 number) magazines. Like those that end in -prah or -eople.

Next, distributors take your magazine shipment, break it into smaller shipments, and send those smaller shipments off to bookstores. Then your magazine gets put on a bookshelf and waits for someone to notice it. "Yoo hoo, over here!" says your cover. (Yoo hoo is underused in our opinion. Never underestimate the power of "yoo hoo!")

Some of the magazines sell, and different people get paid from those sales. The bookstore takes its cut. The distributor takes her cut. You get what's left - but remember, only SOME of those magazines that you originally shipped out sold, and what DIDN'T sell gets pulped. That's right, destroyed. Which means the magazines that sell have to pay for the magazines that get destroyed. And in the magazine industry, it's not unusual to destroy 60 copies to sell 40 (meaning that out of 100 copies shipped to bookstores, 40 sell, and 60 get pulped). Yes, it's an incredible waste of resources - trees, ink, time and money. So why do magazines do it at all? Because some that operate based on an ad-revenue business model make enough money from advertising to subsidize destroyed magazines. And because the "that's-just-the-way-it-is-in-this-industry" mantra has so far stopped anybody from coming up with some kind of distribution method that works better.

So, in our case, what's left from each sale of an ads-free Beyond in bookstores is LESS than what the magazine costs to produce. Which means bookstore distribution costs us  money. Which means it doesn't make much sense to distribute Beyond through bookstores. Which means we send very few copies to them. Which means, your best bet is to get Beyond here.

Tell the world!

(End public service announcement.)