The Magazine Blueprint - Sample Chapter by The Magazine Blueprint

THE MAGAZINE BLUEPRINT The Ultimate Guide to Indie Publishing

BY CONOR PURCELL

2. getting started

“You have to have a mission when you’re publishing, otherwise you have nothing” – Henry Luce

Don’t assume that you know what the thing you are trying to produce is on day one. You can’t know beforehand what it is until you start doing it. It is only through continual practice that the voice, the internal narrative as a persona will come through. Having said that, you also need to be precise in terms of why you are starting a magazine and what you are trying to achieve. Jack Self Real Review

efore you set up a magazine, you need to ask yourself one question: why? If the answer is money or fame, then it’s probably better to save yourself a lot of time, stress and heartache and stop right now. Very few people get rich from magazines, and those that do put in an awful lot of effort and get very lucky. The vast majority of independent magazine publishers toil away unnoticed, putting in the hours and their savings towards a project which they feel that they, and only they, could conceive of. Indeed, even those that do get rich can lose it all in ill-advised brand extensions (see Penthouse’s Bob Guccione, who we will come to later). There is a great scene in Jerry Seinfeld’s 2002 documentary Comedian, where Seinfeld berates a younger comic, Orny Adams, for comparing his life unfavourably to his Wall Street friends. “Was there anything else you would rather have been doing?” Seinfeld asks, not unreasonably. And it’s a good point. If you can imagine a life that does not involve publishing a magazine, then you are better off saving yourself the trouble. If, however, you can’t

imagine doing anything else, then welcome aboard! There are few things more satisfying than ripping open a box of your magazines, fresh from the printer; smelling the paper, and holding a product you made in your hands. Even better is wandering into a shop or café and seeing your magazine on sale, or watching as someone picks up a copy and buys it. The sweet spot is where something you absolutely must do is aligned with a gaping hole in the market. When passion and opportunity align, great things can happen. You may be obsessed with luxury travel, but the market is pretty well saturated with titles, and unless you have a serious amount of financing, it is going to be very hard to produce anything comparable to say Condé Nast Traveller. Be realistic. What are you good at? What do you enjoy? Would you be happy interviewing architects and urban planners or would you rather spend time with surfers and skateboarders? Is there a question you want answered, or is there something you love that is not represented on the newsstand, or (even worse) represented in

a clichéd and tired way? And remember there is no shame in being second, third or even fourth in a category – lots of people make lots of money not being number one. But don’t pick a subject just because you think there is a gap in the market. If you pick a subject you don’t have a passion for, you will give up, or produce a bad magazine, or produce a bad magazine and then give up. Either way, you would have been better off never starting. This is the most important part of the process. Choose the wrong subject and you will end up with the first issue of the magazine in your hands and a growing sense of dread at having to do it all again for issue two. Whatever you choose to focus on should excite you. So think carefully and examine all the pros and cons. While you might love photography, can you afford the photographers you would like to feature? Or can you publish a magazine about photography in a new way? Has it been done before? Did it succeed or fail? Talk to friends, family, editors, designers; most people are happy to be asked their opinion, and they might see some angles you

have not thought about. That said, don’t let naysayers put you off. As that possibly apocryphal Henry Ford saying goes: if he had asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses. Just because something has not been done before does not mean it can’t be done. Great magazines are often produced in order to fill a gap in the market, or, as a counterpoint to an existing publication. The origins of New York magazine began when Clay Felker realised how much The New Yorker bored him. He decried the magazine as formulaic and staid. Often, figuring out what you don’t like is the best way understand what you should be aiming at. One of the main reasons I started We Are Here was my visceral dislike of the travel magazine genre. I found the majority of magazines dull. They were badly written, poorly designed, and rife with barely concealed PR filler sitting next to glossy advertisements. They were far removed from my own experiences of travel, and it seemed bizarre, when every other magazine genre had cutting-edge publi-

Make friends in the industry. Be an extrovert, get out there and meet as many people as possible: publishers, freelancers and printers, and be willing to share the contacts you make. I come from a background of places like Haymarket where everything was done very scientifically; there were constant focus groups. However I always remember what David Hepworth [publisher who launched Q, More and Heat magazines among others] said which was that you have to go with your instincts. If you think something is good, useful and fun, the chances are there are others who feel the same way. Fraser Allen Hot Rum Cow

You need passion, a great idea and patience, but in the end you have to want to do it. At the moment it’s cool to do a magazine, so people think they might do one, but you need to know who you are talking to and what you want to say and then make sure that a magazine is the right vehicle. That’s not to say you can’t pull off a magazine, but you are really lengthening the odds unless you have a very clear idea of who you are targeting. My first piece of advice when people ask me if they should do a magazine is ‘don’t.’ You have to be quite dogged and have the attitude that ‘you don’t know how good I am going to make this magazine, I have to do it.’ And then you can have a conversation about how best to do it. Jeremy Leslie Magculture

cations, travel magazines were so old fashioned. Of course, since then the likes of Lost and Another Escape have changed the game, and the indie travel magazine genre is thriving. Just because you think you have a great idea for magazine, it doesn’t mean you actually have one. One way to find out if anyone else would be interested in your magazine is to – wait for it – ask them. Yes, market research can get a bad rap, but it can be invaluable. Think of it as tweaking the product before you launch. Who is your ideal reader? What do they do? Where do they live? What are they interested in? If, for example, you want to launch a magazine about winter sports, then you should research various winter sport forums and blogs. Ask a few questions; find out about the people you will be writing for. You may find they have some good ideas, or they may point you in the direction of five other winter sports magazines, which may (or may not) make you think twice about launching your own product. Use an online survey builder like Typeform to set up a questionnaire and find out what your target market wants.

For Ryan Fitzgibbon, founder of Hello Mr, a Brooklyn-based magazine for gay men, the brand was key. “Start and consider it as a brand before you consider it as a printed thing, and make sure the brand feels necessary and consistent in its message and the pages will fill itself and the guidelines for contributors will be clear,” he told me at his Brooklyn HQ. “The first thing I did was put together the brand guidelines, which came from the designer in me, and it’s similar to building the spec sheet for a logo but building it out to all these different things – this is the type of person he sounds like, these are the type of things he enjoys. It’s about giving him a personality so people can sort of give context to it. “Throughout all my branding, the communication is loose and fun – my Instagram used to be what I did when I procrastinated but now it’s very important that I craft the message in the right way and spend time on it. I really like to have fun with that, and one of my favourite posts recently was a photo of two cute guys holding hands and I just wrote “yuck” whereas most gay magazines would

have been really positive and I really enjoy being honest and having fun with it. It feels like a person, not a brand, or something too polished.” Hello Mr has been a huge success, but it was based on a solid foundation – it plugged a gap in the market and did so in a way consistent with the founder’s values. You need to think along the same lines. Hollywood invented the concept of the elevator pitch, that is, if you had an elevator ride to convince someone of the merits of your idea, what would you say? As important as the central conceit, but often harder to figure out, is the tone of the magazine. What do you want the reader to feel when they read it? Should they be amused, informed, shocked, entertained? All of the above? Figuring this out is important as it will result in consistency – and consistency is the thing that prevents your magazine ending up as a collection of articles with no thread to them. You need to work out what that thread is going to be – with We Are Dublin, the main thread is of course the city of Dublin. But there are other things that tie the magazine

together. The design is similar for each article; the fonts are the same, the photos are taken on an iPhone; the idea being if you see one article you will know what magazine it is in. Of course some magazines go for different fonts and different designs in each feature – with Open Skies, Emirates’ inflight magazine, we used different headline fonts in each article, deciding that as the Open Skies readership is so diverse, most people are not going to read the whole magazine. So each article was almost a thing in itself; it worked for Open Skies (which had a print run of more than 100,000) but that wouldn’t work for We Are Dublin and probably won’t work for your magazine. Emirates is a global brand, well established. Your brand is not global and not well established – you need to create an atmosphere in your magazine, and that atmosphere is down to you. Are you going to be playful? Authoritative? Iconolastic? Satirical? Irreverent? You can be a mixture of these attitudes, but you should have an attitude, something that people know they are going to get when they pick you up. One of the more

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Do it! But don’t put everything on the line. I still have a role outside of the magazine that pays my bills. Elsie is a labour of love for me – it might develop further and eventually reduce the need for me to have an outside role, but if it doesn’t then I’m proud of what I’ve done so far. I had an idea and I’ve taken it to market – that for me, feels like a huge achievement in itself. The buzz of having my own magazine is worth all of the hard work. Les Elsie Elsie Magazine

If we had been really informed about all the challenges that we would face at the beginning, we probably would have never done it. It’s hard to do a magazine in this day and age with the integrity and quality level that you want it to have, and it’s hard to work that out financially with the models that are available. Funding it yourself has its own risks. Raising money to do it has its own risks. Focusing on print has its own risks and doing print and digital has its own risks. If you don’t have the passion and compulsion to make it, don’t make it – there are enough magazines in the world. Chris Isenberg Victory Journal

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successful indie titles of recent years is Little White Lies. Created by Church of London, a London-based creative agency, the magazine focuses on one film each issue and combines beautiful illustrations with razor sharp insights. When that agency split, a new company, Human After All, emerged. It is now focusing its attention on the big issues; everything from globalisation to war to climate change, in a magazine called Weapons of Reason. Danny Miller, the driving force behind the magazine, shared some of the insights they have learned over the years in The Publishing Playbook, a Google Doc available to anyone who asks. We can learn a lot from how they framed Weapons of Reason:

nect people to, and articulate, the issues shaping our world.

The big idea

Elevator pitch

Weapons of Reason is a project to understand and articulate the global challenges shaping our world. Because (including mention of our audience)

Many people are not as engaged with the world as they’d like to admit. Design communicators have unique skills to help con-

Values – what do we believe in?

Embrace complexity in a positive way. Speaking from an unbiased and global perspective. Coupling curiosity and discovery with sobriety and authority.  There’s more that connects us than divides us. What’s our vision?

We’re trying to inspire people to think about big problems – to give them knowledge that they will be compelled to act upon/ turn into action.  Personality – how do we want to come across?

Curious, authoritative, engaging, inspirational, educational. We’re making a magazine to save the world!  Take a look at those headers and fill in your own answers. If you can’t yet, then go back and think about the type of magazine you want to make. As Danny said when I met him in his East London office: “You need to think about issue two.

Issue one you will be excited about and you will pour your life savings into, but you need to think about issues two, three, four, five, six – you need to have at least a year plan. You need to have a spreadsheet with a three-year plan that details everything that’s going to happen and what you are going to get paid. You need to be really organised and business-like from day one. Issue one might be the best magazine anyone has ever made and people will weep with joy when they see it, and then you never make another magazine again, because you didn’t plan ahead. It’s so easy to do that.” A good way to figure out just what type of magazine you want to produce is to write a mission statement. This can be as short as fifty words or less – the key is that it explains what your magazine is trying to achieve. Below are two very different mission statements, one for We Are Dublin and one for Open Skies. We Are Dublin mission statement

We Are Dublin is a new type of magazine for the city. Compelling, innovative and literate,

with stylish design, high production values and the most global distribution footprint of any magazine in the country, we are the new face of the city. Published quarterly in high-stock matt finish and with local contributors, the magazine is lo-fi and high end – a long-form postcard from the city every three months. Our readers are educated, well traveled and bored with the current local magazine offerings. They consider Dublin their home, but have a global outlook. They work in PR, the media, in the arts and in finance; they are gallery owners and entrepreneurs, artists and filmmakers, they run ad agencies and websites. They are cultural leaders and are passionate about the things they love. They are early adopters and ‘sharers’ – they will tell their social group about things they love – both in person and online, and they are listened to by their peer group.

If you want to make a good magazine, you should only do it as a side project next to your main job where you earn actual money. By being financially independent, you are able to push your concept a lot further and you will be able to try things that are otherwise not possible if your next month’s rent is dependent on it. Max Siedentopf Ordinary Magazine

Open Skies mission statement

Open Skies is the monthly magazine for Emirates. Each issue we bring together the best writers, photographers and artists to create the world’s best onboard magazine. We believe in

You need to think about issue two. Issue one you will be excited about and you will pour your life savings into, but you need to think about issues two, three, four, five and six. You need to have a spreadsheet with a three-year plan that details out everything that’s going to happen, and what you are going to get paid. You need to be super diligent and organised and business-like from day one. Issue one might be the best magazine anyone has ever made and people will weep with joy when they see it, and then you never make another magazine again, because you didn’t plan ahead. Danny Miller Weapons of Reason

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print, in long-form journalism and in outstanding photography. With over 2.3 million passengers a month flying on Emirates, we are a truly global magazine, read by a global audience. We go deeper than other inflight magazines with longer, more in-depth features. Our covers are works of art in their own right. We are collectible – you will want to take us off the plane. Your mission statement will be different to both of these, and might be written in a very different way. What’s key is that it reminds you of what you are trying to achieve and who you are trying to target. You need to remember the type of magazine you are trying to make – only you can know if individual articles, writers and photographers are right for you. Once you have a fair idea of what type of magazine you want to produce, it’s time to get to work. And while it is possible to produce a magazine on your own, the effort may just destroy you. At some point you are going to have to deal with others, whether they be writers, designers, illustrators, photographers or even just the person at the printer.

We Are Dublin is as close as possible to a one-man project, but I collaborate on every issue with writers and photographers. I also deal directly with my stockists and the printer. At the opposite end of the spectrum is a magazine like The Outpost, a Beirut-based magazine about everything from architecture and politics to art and science. Although it is the brainchild of one man, Ibrahim Nehme, it is very much a collaboration, with designers, writers, photographers and illustrators coming together (often remotely) to produce each issue. This has not always worked to plan, as Ibrahim explains: “It was very challenging, but maybe not for the obvious reasons. The designers that created our design grid and art directed the first three issues were Spanish, and based in Madrid, so there was a major language barrier. The Outpost is a complex conceptual product, so literally not speaking the same language was too difficult. It was also difficult to manage over Skype and email, and was one of the reasons that led us to move our design operation to Beirut.” Having a designer in the same

room as you (if you are not designing yourself ) is key. The ability to tweak the designs in real time is crucial to getting the magazine you have in your head onto the page. While some aspects of the process can be outsourced, I would argue that design is not one of them. Of course, you can attempt to produce a magazine entirely alone. Les Jones single-handedly publishes Elsie, a quirky title that focuses on photography, typography and design. Jones, a designer and photographer, explains the pluses and minuses of working alone. “The main benefits are I can control the cost and I am in complete creative control, so there are no rules and I can do whatever I want. I guess the downside is that it’s hard. Some of the more menial elements such as cutting out pictures are a ball-ache and I can’t do things as fast as I would like.” The other danger of working alone is that you may slowly go mad. Days and nights spent staring at a screen can have a detrimental effect on your physical and mental health, and it can be valuable to send finished articles or proposed covers to someone you can

trust to give honest feedback – they don’t have to be a designer or editor, most of your readers won’t be either. Most creative endeavours are solo affairs so if you do choose to work alone you are in good company. However if you are not getting outside feedback it’s important to maintain an inner quality control. You need to be constantly asking yourself ‘can this be better?’ And, conversely, ‘will adding anything to this make it worse?’ It’s a fine line and you need to trust your gut. After all it’s your magazine so don’t be afraid of listening to your own opinions. If you are not sure what you are doing is any good, and don’t trust friends or family to be honest, you can look at existing magazines and compare them to yours. This of course, can be fraught with problems. Taking the best in the business (Wired, say, or New York magazine) and comparing them to your project is not exactly fair. Those titles have budgets and staff you can only dream of, and you are seeing their finished product, not the articles, designs and concepts that never made it to print. That said, it can be instructive to go through one of

You first need to ask yourself why you’re making a magazine and you need a clear answer to that question. After that, there are important things that need to be figured out, like: What is the magazine about? Why is it important? Who are its readers? Why will they care? How will the magazine reach these readers? How will it make make money? Answers to these questions will most likely change later, or maybe not, but it’s important to have clear answers from the beginning. Because really, competition is so tough and making a magazine is not a piece of cake. It requires a lot of energy, commitment, investment, and patience. Ibrahim Nehme The Outpost

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You have to have a thing that makes you stand out and if you don’t have that, you are sunk. But, that’s just the starting point, as there are all sorts of magazines that have a great blazing idea and they don’t manage to do anything. I think the biggest thing is to be really sure you know who is going to buy this magazine. There are people who make a magazine which is just for them, and maybe they get lucky and that’s great, but they are in the minority. Steve Watson Stack Magazines

their issues and figure out just what it makes it so good. Take a look at the features – how many people are quoted, how many interviews took place, what was the access like? Look at the smaller, front-ofbook pieces – are they telling you something you don’t know? Are they coming at a topic in a new way? Pay attention to what the best in the business are doing, and how they are doing it – it can only help improve what you create. x x x Now is the time to think about deadlines. When you start a magazine, there is no real pressure to produce anything – you have no readers after all, and no stockists. So the temptation is to tweak and tweak and tweak, and never get the thing to press. This is foolhardy – not only can constant iterations make a magazine worse, but much of the learning process comes from what happens after you send it into the wild. As author Salman Rushdie said: “There’s a point at which you’re not making it better; you’re just making it different.” I have found setting a date

with the printer – even if that’s three or six months down the line – helps focus the mind, particularly for the first issue. Work backwards from the print date and fill in all the elements that comprise the magazine, from design deadlines to text deadlines. Working in a structured way will ensure your time is spent on the creative process, and not on desperately trying to keep the whole project from collapsing. You can see a sample timetable at the end of this chapter. Once you get your first issue up and running, deadlines should be easier. It’s not unusual for a new magazine to take a year to put together, while subsequent issues fit easily in a three-month cycle. We will look more at the production cycle in Chapter Four. For your first issue, allow six months from idea to print. That will give you lots of time to plan, execute, and build an audience, while still allowing you to hold down a day job. Any less and you will probably be rushing, any more and you may never publish. By issue two you (should) know your tone and style, have settled on fonts and page furniture. And once issue one is out,

the real work starts. As we see in Chapter Six, ‘a build it and they will come’ attitude won’t work. While planning issue two will take up some of your time, promoting and distributing your first issue will be paramount, so ensure you have enough time to promote the first issue before you concentrate on the second. x x x One of the most crucial steps at this stage of the process is building up an audience. This is something that needs to happen at the very start of the process, not once the magazine is published. Of course, you will double down on the promotional end of things once you get your magazine back from the printer, but you need to have an audience already in place. You build your audience by setting up social media accounts and populating them with content regularly. Ideally you will set up a content plan for your social channels and stick to it. The tone and style of this content should match the eventual tone and style of your magazine, and even if you are

not 100 per cent sure of your voice, this is a great way to test it out. As London-based architecture magazine, Real Review’s Jack Self told me: “Don’t assume that you know what the thing you are trying to produce is on day one. You can’t know beforehand what it is until you start doing it. It is only through continual practice that the voice, the internal narrative as a persona will come through.” So, post on your social channels and see what works and what doesn’t, what gets feedback and what’s ignored. You might start off with an authoritative tone of voice but find a playful, irreverent style gets much more traction. Before setting up your social channels, you are going to need to choose a name. Before you decide this, check and see if it is in use. Google it. Two friends and I once set up a mobile applications company in Dubai called URBN Travel. A few months later, we got a cease and desist letter from Urban Outfitters demanding we stop using the name (URBN is their name on the stock exchange). I would like to say we doubled down and fought to keep our name, but we immediately

Be original! And know your audience. Actually, BE your audience if you possibly can. Stick to your guns. Always think about what your reader is getting out of every story, every picture, every part of your product. Put them first and everything else will flow from that. Jo Walker Frankie Magazine

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Magazine creators are very generous. It’s always worth making contact with other creators as they’re happy to offer advice if they can. It’s a very supportive scene. Dan Stafford Amuseum

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capitulated. With any luck the name you pick won’t be used by any faux-hipster brands, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. You will need to check the URL – go somewhere like Namecheap and see if someone is using it. Most halfway legible names are already in use in a dot com format, but you can get around that by adding ‘magazine’ to the end or ‘thisis’ to the start of your name. The shorter the URL the better however, but it’s not the be all and end all. In days gone by, marketers thought a catchy web address was the key to untold riches (witness sex.com selling for $14 million in 2006); it’s not – if you produce good content, the URL is beside the point, so don’t spend too long worrying about it. You should also check that the name is available on Twitter and Instagram – having even slightly different names on all three will confuse. As for what name you should pick, it probably matters less than you think. It should however be memorable. For some reason independent food and drink magazines have great names: Lucky Peach, Fire & Knives, The Gourmand, Hot Rum Cow. Hot Rum Cow’s

Fraser Allen told me where that name came from: “We spent a lot of time talking about what to call the magazine, far too long. Actually, it taught me a lesson that, with projects like these, it’s important to get everyone involved but give everybody their own area to take ownership of – and not have endless group discussions about every decision. We had something like 50 names being discussed. Some of them were awful but some of them were quite good – like Hopscotch, Chin Chin and Yardarm. I found the name Hot Rum Cow when I was leafing through the index of a book called Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis. The Hot Rum Cow is an old cocktail made from dark rum, warm milk, brown sugar, angostura bitters and nutmeg or vanilla extract. When we discussed it, some of the team loved it and some hated it, which seemed like the perfect response. I loved the evocative sound of the words and the fact it was three words of three letters each.” So when it comes to choosing a name, remember there are no rules, just make sure no one else is using it and try and make it as memorable

as possible. Once you have your name sorted, and have bought the URL and set up your social media accounts, you can start creating content for those channels. What channels you choose to be on is up to you – you need to be focused on creating the magazine, so make sure you are not stretched too thin. You may find that you only need to be on Twitter and Instagram or Instagram and Facebook. Use a service like Tweetdeck, which allows you to bank posts in advance and have them pushed out at a certain time and date. All of your social channels should be driving your visitors towards a website. And that website should have a sign-up form, where visitors can sign up to a mailing list. Keep this short and sweet: first and last name and an email address are all you need. Ask for too much information and people will give up halfway through. You do need to set up an Instagram page, and before you follow anyone, post 6-10 images over a few days – people will not follow an account that looks barren. Once you have a few images posted (and a link in the bio to the website that

you have set up), start following people. This is the easy bit. When I set up the Instagram page for this book (instagram. com/themagazineblueprint), I followed the main magazine websites (Magculture/Stack/ GymClass), but then crucially, I also followed the people that followed those accounts – the logic being that they are interested in magazines so should be interested in my account. Not everyone you will follow will follow you back (my average is about 30 per cent) and not everyone that follows you will purchase your magazine, but a small percentage will, and that’s why you are doing this. You are generating awareness of your brand, and ultimately of your magazine. Once you start to follow people, you need to post frequently – on the Instagram account for this book, I posted an image of a different magazine cover every two days, all with the same background and all with the same information (magazine name, city, issue number) and the following hashtags: #magazines, #print, #editorialdesign and #design. Figure out what hashtags work for your magazine and add them to each image.

It’s definitely worth giving it a shot, although it will probably be more expensive than you expected it to be. Stay true to your original vision for it and trust your instincts. If you care about something passionately enough to want to make a magazine about it, then that’s a good enough starting point. As you go along, people will convince you to change bits of it, and it’s fine to evolve but don’t lose sight of why you started. Mark Hooper Hole & Corner

The size and format came about from things I wouldn’t give up on and things I couldn’t afford. If you are doing something for the first time that ends up being the two things that will shape what you do. We couldn’t go above a certain page count given the number of copies we wanted to print. The main thing was looking around at other indie magazines and seeing what was being done well and how they were doing that. Roisin Agnew Guts

You need to do the same for Twitter – follow as many relevant accounts as you can, after you have first posted fifty tweets and retweets. Make sure the image/ branding on Twitter, Instagram and on your website is the same. Add everyone you follow to Twitter Lists, such as ‘Awesome Baristas,’ as they will see you have added them to a List, and will become aware of your existence. Ensure the images you post on all your channels are consistent with the look and feel of the magazine – that doesn’t mean they have to be art directed, but they should reflect the magazine’s aesthetic, whether that’s chic or grungy. Do this and by the time you have your first issue out, you should have a few thousand followers on your social media channels and hopefully, a mailing list of 500 or more people. These are the people you can target with your first issue – send the mailing list an email and promote the magazine on your channels. If you have not done this, you will be forced to build up an audience after you publish, and that’s not going to result in many sales.

x x x Once you have your online presence sorted and you have worked out a social media content plan, it’s time to start thinking about the nuts and bolts of your magazine: How big is the magazine going to be? How many pages will it have? What type of paper and binding will it have? How frequent will it be?

The best way to figure out all this is to pick up as many existing magazines as possible. Which ones do you like? Which ones do you not like? You will find yourself drawn to certain titles, so ask yourself why – why do you like Magazine A and not Magazine B? We Are Here gained a reputation as a ‘lo-fi’ travel magazine, and it got a lot of publicity for the fact all the photos were taken on an iPhone. That was not a marketing masterstroke on my part, I simply could not afford a photographer, so I had to take the photos myself. The same thing applied with the design – I designed it myself, as

it was cheaper, and as I am not a trained designer, I wasn’t able to create complex page designs. How your magazine looks will give off lots of signals – so you need to be sure the look and feel of the magazine reflects the content inside. If the articles are going to be playful, the design should probably reflect that. There are constraints however, on what you can and can’t do. The majority of these, predictably, come down to cost. Ultimately, most magazines are compromises. I initially wanted an embossed masthead, but couldn’t afford it. You may want open-binding and a fifth colour on the cover, but might not be able to get that without sacrificing something else more important. Figure out what the most important things are to you. Is it the paper stock, the photography, the binding? I would advise you to spend money on the production rather than the print volume. If you can afford the pimped-out production you want with 1,000 copies but not with 5,000 copies, then always go with 1,000 copies on your first issue. In fact, unless you have hundreds of pre-orders, I would suggest not going above

1,000 copies, however much money you have. Nothing can sap your motivation than a spare room full of unsold copies. For Roisin Agnew, who set up and runs the Dublin-based confessional magazine, Guts, the process of deciding on the size and scope of the magazine was very much one of trial and error. “It was very much a decision between stuff I wouldn’t give up on and stuff I could not afford. I think if you are doing something for the first time, they are the two things that will shape what you do. I was most concerned about the binding and the use of colour. I wanted each issue to have a small spine, so each one would have a separate colour so they would pop when all lined up together. As for the size, I just looked at other indie magazines and chose a size I liked best. The real constraint when it came to the number of pages was cost – we just couldn’t go above a certain page count. Overall, the main help was just looking around at other indie magazines to see what they were doing.” So, once you have gathered three or four magazines that you like – then what? Well you

It’s difficult – there’s too many magazines and too many brands, so in order to survive that you need to have a very good USP – you need to have something new or at least something different to offer. You need to give the customer an excuse to buy you. That needs to be established first and foremost. If you allow money to colour your content you won’t be able to establish that USP. David Hellqvist Document Studios

thisisguts.com

There’s always a balance to strike between taking risks and putting something out to the market and thinking deeply through the long-term vision to inform your strategy. The reality is magazine makers are dealing with a lot of uncertainty, and Makeshift wouldn’t have been successful if I hadn’t taken the risks I did. In retrospect, there’s a lot I know now that I would use to better set myself up for success from day one. Steve Daniels Makeshift

can find out who printed each magazine (most magazines have the printer details on the credits page) and ask them how much it would cost for you to print the same specifications on a thousand-copy print run. The other option is to find a printer near you and bring in those four magazines and ask them how much they would print each for. Eventually you will get a sense of what drives the cost up and what doesn’t make that much difference. A good, engaged printer is crucial – they should be a partner in the process, not an adversary. While it’s obviously in their interests for you to spend as much as possible, it’s also in their interest for you to give them more business. So be firm but fair with your printer – let them know what you want to do and ask them to provide solutions. But as Jeremy Leslie, Magculture’s founder, pointed out when I met him in London, it’s up to the client – you – to know what you want before you talk to the printer. “From the printers point of view, they are getting calls and emails all day looking for information on projects. They get specific enquiries, and that

initial request is what they will rely on. The best way to get useful information is to meet them and show them the magazine you are thinking of doing and explain why you like it and they might be able to point out if you did it 10mm less, you can save X amount of money. You build up a relationship, and then they will start offering up other options. Usually they know a hell of a lot about what is possible, but if they get a specific request, they are going to respond accordingly. There is still the idea that the customer is right – so they are going to respond to that.” Pagination is another obvious element that can drive up price, so make sure you know how many pages you want. We will look at making up a flat plan in the next chapter, but for now anywhere from 64-104 pages would be standard for a debut indie magazine. Don’t worry too much about page count for now, just remember you should be going up in sections of eight pages (plus the four cover pages). Frequency tells the reader something about your magazine. An annual or bi-annual magazine is going to look and

feel different from a monthly – compare something bi-annual like Cereal to something weekly like Shortlist. As a rule of thumb, the more infrequent a magazine is, the more is spent on paper quality and the more collectible it is. Magazines that come out weekly, or even monthly, tend to be more throwaway and transient. For your first year, bi-annual is best – it’s more manageable in terms of time and cost and it gives you some breathing room between the issues. If your title is a roaring success, you can always increase frequency in the future. There are many different options for binding, all of which will communicate to the reader and all of which will be different costs. Most indie title go for perfect bound: it’s relatively inexpensive and it is fairly robust. What will work for you depends on your budget, how many pages you are printing and what you want your magazine to look and feel like. Ask your printer what the options are and figure out which one is right for you. x x x

What’s the one thing all the magazines you see in your local newsagent have in common? They are filled with stories. Some magazines are filled with terrible stories, and some are filled with compelling stories, but at the heart of any magazine is storytelling. So, you first need to figure out what stories you want to tell. You also need to figure out how you want to tell them, but for now, let’s focus on finding the stories. One of the great newshounds of the 20th century was Jimmy Breslin, a tough Pulitzer Prizewinning Irish-American reporter who wrote for New York, the Daily News and Newsday. Here he is talking about news reporting, but it applies to finding stories of any type: “The only lesson that you could give people is how to climb stairs, because there are no stories on the first floor. Anything you are looking for is four and five flights up.” Walk the streets, ask questions, talk to people, ask them who the most interesting person they know is, poke around, ask more questions, and keep asking why. Often, all you need to do is go in the opposite direction of the herd. JFK’s assassination

You can talk about things for ages and we talked about the magazine for 18 months before we started. We spent that time brainstorming and figuring out how we should do different things, but looking back we should have just started earlier. You only learn as you go – it’s only then you find out what’s working and what’s not. Steve Ryan Root + Bone

newyorker.com/news/ news-desk/postscriptjimmy-breslin

poynter.org/news/remembering-jimmy-breslinand-gravedigger-schoolnews-writing

Go out and talk to people and tell them why it is you want to create your magazine and what it’s about. For me, that’s way more useful than spending my time managing an Instagram account. Jack Self Real Review

was the biggest news story of the 1960s. While the world’s media was camped outside the Capitol Building – where JFK’s body was laid out – Breslin decided to go and talk to the guy who was going to dig the president’s grave. The resulting piece was remarkable, and brought the event down to a human level. Often you won’t know if you have a story until you poke around a bit. Sometimes there is nothing there, sometimes there is. As the legendary writer Gay Talese put it, you just have to “hang out a bit.” Depending on the subject of your magazine, finding good stories may be related to finding people with interesting stories to tell. Every industry has its trade press; usually monthly magazines (and websites) that focus on say architecture or hospitality. Read through these and find interesting people, trends and angles. If you want to go more in-depth than the trade press, then reach out to the people featured; show an interest, be honest, ask lots of questions. Most people are flattered to be asked about the industry they work in, to be asked about their

lives and careers. Most of us toil away unnoticed; if someone comes along wanting to shine a light on what we do, we are flattered and cooperative. Books are full of ideas. Both fiction and non-fiction books can be mined for ideas. Nothing is sacred and everything is up for grabs, so read widely and often. In the past year I have read about everything from the banana industry and mountain climbing to water shortages in Uzbekistan. The point is not the subject matter, but how the writer explores a topic. The following four books tackle their subjects in very different ways: Rich Cohen – The Fish That Ate the Whale

The American author Rich Cohen tracks the improbable success of one man, the banana magnate Sam Zemurray, using his rags-to-riches life story to explore everything from American imperialism to the growth of the multinational. In the right hands, zeroing in on one person to illustrate much broader topics works brilliantly, and this is one of the best books of its type.

John Vaillant – Tiger

Vaillant travels to Siberia to revisit a deadly tiger attack that shook the residents of a small town in Russia’s Far East. Vaillant retraces the steps of the tiger and uses the attacks to examine man’s relationship with animals and the realities of life in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. His ability to form coherent characters from documents, relationships, memories and objects is unparalleled, and shows how great writing can reconstruct events that have already taken place. Geoff Dyer – Another Great Day at Sea

Geoff Dyer puts himself in the centre of this book, and uses the ‘fish out of water’ trope to great effect, spending a number of weeks onboard a mammoth US aircraft carrier, the USS George Bush. By writing in the first-person, Dyer is essentially taking the reader’s place and allowing us to see how 5,000 people live aboard a giant war machine. This technique only works with talented writers and Dyer is first class. Jean Hatzfield – Machete Season

Hatzfield’s book features long interviews with 10 Hutu men who took part in the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis over a period of 100 days. Letting these men recount the events in their own words is an incredibly powerful device, not least because they show absolutely no remorse, and the prosaic way they describe how they murdered gives the book a chilling power. There are plenty of ways to present content, each style is equally valid, and you can use various styles across your magazine. Figure out what the best way to tell each particular story is and work with your writers to ensure the maximum impact for your reader. The streets of a city tell many stories; you just have to know where to look. Buildings that at first glance seem ordinary often have clues to their past if you look hard enough: plaques and coving and masonry details. Even typing an address into Google can bring up its history – how much it sold for, who lived there, what it was used for. Be curious, talk to city planners and historians, and find out what the city looked like in decades past.

People should think about what their thing is and why it needs to be a thing. Why is your project different from other projects? We are in an era where everyone wants to publish, and so we have lots of magazines that look like other magazines. There’s so much almost outright copying – so think about why something needs to exist and what’s already out there. Look at what others are doing and educate yourself. Elana Schlenker Gratuitous Type

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The best advice I can give is just do it – don’t make the great the enemy of the good, as you can’t see the problems until you have made the thing. Just make it and iterate and make it better. If you look back at issue one of Delayed Gratification, we made a vital error. We were so keen to fit so much in, we ended up using a very small font size, and it was very difficult for people to read. We only fixed that in issue three. Rob Orchard Delayed Gratification

Try to figure out why things are happening. The ‘who,’ ‘what’ and ‘where’ is the easy part, it’s the ‘why’ that’s difficult, but also the most interesting. Finding stories is not that hard, you just have to be curious, engaged and willing to ask questions. Dig that bit deeper than national newspapers or blogs do, and be willing to do lots of research. Often you will find yourself down blind alleys, drowning in statistics, or historical records. But, from this chaos, a nugget of inspiration may emerge. Or, if you talk to five people about a subject, maybe one person will mention a fascinating character you can talk to. Ask around, ask your friends and family, ask everyone you know to tell you stories, to tell you who they think is the most interesting person they have met. Keep digging, keep questioning and – whether you are making a magazine about politics or skateboarding – great stories will emerge. You can also take stories that have already been told and tell them in a new way. I spoke to Seb Emina, the editor of The Happy Reader, a quarterly magazine produced by Penguin Books and Fantastic Man’s Gert

Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom. I wanted to know how one article in the second issue – a series of photographs of boiling water, was conceived. “There is an amazing section in the book [Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea] about the three stages of boiling as codified by this ancient tea scholar in China, so we asked the photographer Jason Edwards to stand around with a pan of boiling water and capture that passage, and I thought there would be something glorious and beautiful about that. We thought about putting the passage next to the image but in the end we thought it was better to leave it out and to capture the joy of reading it, rather than it becoming sort of a DVD extra.” Seb also made a great point about tackling a subject indirectly, which is another way of coming up with compelling content. “The vision is to do something that is not about the book directly but is in its orbit, so if you have never heard of the Book of The Season and will never read it, you can still have a lovely time reading that section. We don’t want to spoon feed the reader the link

between the articles and the book.” What can you do differently? It may seem that every story has been told, but you can tell some of these stories in a new way. Figuring out how to do that is the fun part. And to figure that out, you need to know what type of magazine you are going to be. Be different, take some risks and never forget why you are making your magazine in the first place. There are so many small details involved in getting your magazine into the shops, it’s sometimes easy to forget the big picture – but you need to keep reminding yourself what all the hard work is for. Have fun and great things just might happen.

THE MAGAZINE BLUEPRINT THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO INDIE publishing. The inside guide to setting up and running your own independent magazine. Expert insights from more than fifty magazine makers from around the world. Learn how to: choose the right size and paper stock. Figure out the best marketing and distribution strategy. Find out how to get sales and sponsors. Discover how to turn your magazine into a brand. Interviews with:

The New York Times Magazine Delayed gratification Hello Mr George Lois New York Magazine Zeit Magazin Apartamento Magculture David carson Real Review Stack Magazines Steven heller buffalo zine and lots more!

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