beyond magazine

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.)

Blogging the Alberta Magazines Conference: Part 2

As much as we like the word grassroots, it can be hard to get people to notice a little patch of lawn in the wide field of making and sharing good things. We often ask folks (like you!) who like us to mention us on their blogs or to show us to their friends in grand show-and-tell fashion. It's one of the only ways for small things to grow - by creating buzz. A publisher at a previous conference told us that his magazine grew person by person. It was that small but also that great because you could see the connections.

It's really hard to know how to get folks involved in an increasingly busy and fragmented society. We're open to hearing about ways that you think might create buzzy feelings around Beyond. Have you been involved in other grasroots initiatives that have been great fun? Buzzy. We're thinking bees. But not killer bees. That would be bad.

Blogging the Alberta Magazines Conference: Part 1

One of the key conversations occurring in the magazine industry centers around digital content. In the future, will magazines be entirely replaced by online versions? What happens to a paper object in a digital world? Many publishers look on with fear and trepidation wondering if much of their experience and hard work will disappear into bits and bytes.

The workshop I am sitting in takes a different view. Magazines, like many enjoyable objects on the net, can take advantage of new technologies like blogging software for updates and continued content, social networks for building community, and online programs for developing content or events over a wide network.

I don't think magazines or books or print objects will disappear. As our reader community knows, Beyond is big on beautiful objects as per the Small Art Revolution (see our latest issue). If anything, digital content will not only help us make new connections but will make publishers of all kinds up their game. Our magazine content - visual and text - needs to be more unique, suited to the printed page, and worthy of the time- and money-intensive print process.

For small publishers like Beyond, the digital world adds an extra challenge. Time is short at low staff or no staff volunteer-run magazines. And digital content can be just another thing on the to-do list.  As a reader-built print magazine, we know our readers often enjoy being involved in online connections (more chances to connect coming soon!). For now, you can sign up for our online newsletter list.

(This workshop was run by Issa Breibish from Veer, a very cool company that offers elements for professional creativity, and Milena Radzikowska, a researcher and instructor from Mount Royal College.)

Update: Issa has kindly offered a copy of this presentation at his lovely website, www.issabreibish.com. I completely forgot to mention the idea of moving your Me to We on the net, something that fits nicely with what we are trying to do with Beyond.

This and That about Beyond Magazine

We're getting a bit of traffic from our "How to make a magazine" series. This specifically centers around how to make our magazine, how we're trying to find ways to make ads-free niche media in a market driven world. But since folks are coming here looking specifically for magazine information, I thought I'd mention a couple of resources over the next few days.

We're tightening up our next installment "The Myth of Store Sales" and then we'll be launching Library Joy. We're really excited about that. Get your Library Joy pictures, sketches, and stories ready to share on this very blog.

A few weeks ago, I heard the publisher of Utne speak at a conference in Victoria, BC. He reminded us that as niche publishers our mission was to "tell stories and build community" around the purposes of our magazines. That fits nicely with Beyond's "little magazine about a lot of things" and our no-ads mandate.

And then he went on to remind us that mission-based ventures spend 90% of their time on getting that mission to work. And we can agree with that. We blog, we gather content, we talk to subscribers, we make spreadsheets and do the books. We ask you to join our online newsletter so that we can tell  you how things are going and share the fun.

And all of this is still about making Beyonds, the paper object filled with good things from people around the world. We're reminded of Annie Dillard's quote about a lifeboat against the "wreck of time" and we want to have a good lifeboat even if we are a small one on what seems like an endless sea.

So thanks for coming and hearing about Beyond and all the good people who help make it - from the volunteer working on the blog, to the donor who quietly gives her money that in turn goes to a Beyond artist, and to those who spend time putting stamps on the envelopes while sharing a coffee-infused drink and chatter with us.

We'll keep sharing our stories and gathering that little Beyond community. Thanks for coming to the Beyond blog and being a part of that.

How to Make a Magazine: Part 3 Real Costs

I'm trying to find the  blog source for this. I want to post it right away because it is (Lisa Simpson voice) "Apt!". It reminds me of the Story of Stuff, an online twenty-minute documentary that is worth a snippet of your time this weekend.

Here’s what Husni told me via email when I put the question to him:

The major problem with our industry is we always undercharged for our content. With few exceptions, we made reader feel that they did not have to pay the REAL price for our products. In the U.S. and since the 1950s we adapted the advertising driven model rather than the circulation driven model where people rather than advertisers pay for the magazine. Our audience has become accustomed to the fact that $20 will bring them 52 issues of Time or Newsweek, yet the same $20 will not pay to be connected to the Internet at home. The average American household pays $68 a month to connect to cable television (up from nothing) and you do not hear them complaining.

Simply stated, find a method in which you make your money from the readers and viewers and not from the advertisers. Roy Reiman did it with not one, but 12 different magazines starting from a basement in his house to an empire that was sold to Reader’s Digest for $760 million. Yes, read that again, $760 million. He NEVER sold an ad in any of his magazines.  (Charging for the content is our future….staying dependent on a third party to survive is going to be like that sugar coated poison pill that sooner or later will kill us.

Copyright 2006, Public Broadcasting Service

This is why we spend time defining what Beyond  is - how we see it as a portable art gallery and a way of removing barriers to art access, how we love being involved in the paper arts and how we want to make Beyond(s) into art objects. It's a hard thing to define in the light of disposable publishing and hiding real costs but we'd like to take it on.

Update: the source found at the bottom of this page at Mr. Magazine.

How to Make a Magazine: Part 2

Getting Beyond from Us to You.

Since magazines (1) promote national culture and (2) do so much mailing, national postal services such as Canada Post in Canada (not to be confused with Canada Post in Lithuania) usually cut publishing companies a deal, allowing issues to be mailed for as much as 80% less than the cost of regular letter mail.

But the times, they are a’ changin'. For example, it’s now five minutes later than when we first started this post. And here in the frozen land of rain and sleet and snow and hail, Canada Post, that love-child of the Canadian government, is axing its postage deal as of March 2009. 

This is OK for Beyond, since for a host of reasons, we were never eligible for the mailing deal that would have seen our mailing costs drop from $1.92 to $0.21 per magazine mailed in Canada anyway. (In order to qualify, for example, we would have had to feature advertising in at least 5% of our pages.)

And to qualify for a lesser mail subsidy, we would have had to pay $500 for a magic number that required us to sort addressed magazines in a particular and migraine-inducing way, fill out endless forms, and mail a minimum number of copies at any one time. Not to mention that as a largely volunteer-run organization, we would have had to hire a mailing house to deal with all of the above. (Insert the sound of dollars running away from home.) So in the end, the magic number was magic alright – black magic.

To unravel that ungodly mess and remove ourselves forever from the whims of ever-changing postal subsidy policies, we said, hey, when we buy a book, poster, chair, candle, bowl, car part, lingerie or goldfish online, we pay for shipping. Why can’t it be the same for magazines? And the world rang out, “It can!”

So it was thought of, so it was written, so it shall be done. Time for tea (in the chair by the poster with the book, next to a scantily-clad goldfish swimming in his bowl by candlelight, coddling a car part, and oh – that’s right – the latest issue of Beyond).

 

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.

How to make a magazine: Intro to a 6,137 part series

Once upon a time, in a land just around the corner, Beyond was interviewed by blogger Jen Lemen. We thought we'd reprint the interview here for longevity and oh, to hear ourselves talk... But really, it's our introduction to the Introduction to the Preface of How to Make a Magazine: an opus of 6,137 parts. Coming Soon to somewhere near you. If you're near a computer that is.

JL: whenever i think about independent magazine publishers, i imagine thoughtful people with rumpled hair walking around tiny offices with lots of plants and earnest quotes taped up on the wall...you know, stacks of papers everywhere and couches doubling as beds for dedicated volunteers or maybe the publisher herself.  true/false? what's it like day in and day out, working as a magazine publisher? any highs/lows you wish to report?

Karen@Beyond:  It's both chaotic and quiet. I don't have a pile of earnest quotes but I have a whole wall full of blank pages that gradually fill up with text and highlighter scribbles and then black and white layouts as the design and visual element comes in. It's kind of like growing a little garden each time an issue is produced, except our dirt is blank paper. I try to do my hair every day too.

(Interrupted for morning run and a good long stare at the sky and snow-covered Canadian Rockies.)

I used to be a lot more intense about getting the magazine out and sacrificing my health to do that. But then I decided it would be a really bad idea to have a bunch of burnt out people trying to reflect on what it means to be a human being. So now, I just do what I can in a day, listen, and try to relax about the whole thing.

The highs? That's got to be the collaborative part. You know, the ability to gather people and get their writing and art known and see it all come together in a beautiful way. By the end of an issue, I've gathered (and declined) many, many times the material that you actually see in the magazine. So I'm a little foggy on the whole thing. But when it's finally printed and you see artists look at their work, their eyes all shiny and happy or you watch a reader open up a gorgeous visual spread and run their hands over it, you get this sort of "ahhhh!" feeling. And you can start again on the next one.

The lows? Those are pretty usual to independent art-making. I don't like to highlight them too much and yet you want people to know that things don't come together magically. The lows have to do with money and trying to buy groceries and gathering funding and subscriptions and doing the paperwork. There is an enormous amount of work to do and sometimes I feel like I'm one of those plate spinners. But all art-making has its ordinary and I'm learning to be as grateful for the chance to do that stuff too. I do want to print t-shirts on behalf of indie magazines that say "subscribe dammit!" but then I eat a piece of dark chocolate sent to me by beloved supporters and go on.

I liked Jane Siberry's response in our Beauty issue when we asked her if there was any sacrifice involved in being an independent musician. She said something like "Oh, there's no cost if it's in alignment with you." And then went on to list all the costs in doing something alternative. I thought that was pretty funny.

(Go upstairs, make Earl Grey tea, grab square of dark chocolate...return.)

JL: In Issue 14, you have a conversation with Bruce Cockburn that i can't wait to read.  how did the interview come about? did you get to meet him?

Karen@Beyond: Ahh, interviews. Such strange and wonderful things. "Hello, I've done all this research on you and know where you are born and what you like to eat for breakfast and now I'd like to ask you some questions that will go out to a bunch of strangers and I want you to be sort-of transparent and forthcoming with me but I know you only have a certain amount of time." That being said, I love doing interviews. They are a LOT of hard work from start to finish but also a great way of getting a small piece of someone's story.

I gave the Cockburn interview to a wonderful writer named Darren Hughes who really loves Cockburn's work. Darren blogs over at Long Pauses. He did a great job. We can't really pay our writers much (if anything) so it helps to be able to give them subject matter that they love. Cockburn's people were really helpful in setting the interview up. It was an all around enjoyable experience.

One of my favorite lines from the Cockburn interview is when Darren uses a quote from Bruce's song "World of Wonders"  that talks of "a rainbow shining in a bead of spittle". That really helped me as I was pulling together content around Issue 14's theme of possible worlds and hope.

(Cue up musicto "Waiting for a Miracle" and "Closer to the Light" for a good Cockburn soundtrack to blog questions.)

JL: A few months after receiving my first issue of beyond, i laughed to pick up my tattered copy from beside the couch and note that i had clearly loved beyond to death.  i had not really considered before that it was possible to take in a magazine the same way i loved a  painting, a poem or a book.  what makes a magazine art to you?

Karen@Beyond: I want to thank you for thinking of this. It goes past the whole "Can't you just put it online?" question that is always asked these days. Too often, we think the point of things is information, a kind of mechanical content.

In strange times, people may need to use different words to breathe new meaning into something. And sometimes people have to live the meaning back into old words in order to make them breathe again.

'Magazine' is a word, an idea that the Beyond community of readers and contributors are trying to live new again. The magazine format is an amazing way to be collaborative and imaginative and engaging - all in an incredibly portable package. And creating objects, deliciously tactile objects that can get lost in the world - behind couches, in coffeeshops, left lingering in odd places - is an important part of the way art surprises and finds us.

I'm all for alternative art-making and media that is online but that also exists as something you can touch and really see. We need to look at what a magazine could be as opposed to what most magazines have become - a vehicle for commercial messages. I think that's why alternative print media takes a bit longer to get going. You have to have this initial conversation about how things could be and then present what you really are as opposed to what readers think you are.

JL: we live in a world that believes you should take every opportunity handed to you, that a steady flow of cash from corporate sponsors is a divine sign that you are on the right track.  i think that it's safe to say that beyond, as an ads-free independent magazine is working off  some different assumptions, true? how do you decide what makes it worthwhile to publish in an independent magazine?  what keeps you inspired when things get tough?

Karen@Beyond: I've thought about the "worthwhile" question a lot. This can be hard and it's a really slow process in the midst of a world that pumps out content and information and well, just tons of stuff. Why add another thing to the pile?

But there are so many things that would reduce us to these little one-dimensional nouns. Insert career/religion/relationship/etc. here. The most prevalent noun is probably "consumer" now. We each can stand in our own little places and allow a more colorful, complex and ultimately beautiful picture of humanity to come through. This is what makes anything we do worthwhile, paying attention to what is in front of us and inviting others to join us along the way.

I continue to be inspired by people who take the time to make objects of beauty, like the glass studio and the illustrators featured in Issue 14. I'm inspired by those who put their minds and their efforts toward seeing the world not only as it is but what it could be. I'm inspired by those who take their ordinary and their small and their everyday and find the beauty in it without denying the sadness or suffering that comes to humans. If you stop and really look away from the more obvious sources of "information", you can see people doing amazing things for one another. I forget that sometimes.

(Run outside and turn on the sprinkler making both birds and tulips happy. Have another sip of tea.)

Obstacles

Yeah, we're no-ads. And non-profit. And mostly volunteer run. And full color. And working towards being 100% green. So it often feels a bit like this but if they can do it...