Gene Curtis Blog

I’m not one that gives up easily. The next model I studied was rather interesting and I plan to implement it this summer either myself or by helping a couple of local ezines do it: Discover Southside and SoVaLife.
To understand what I discovered you need to understand the standard structure of a magazine. A glossy, newsstand style magazine is usually comprised of about 50% editorial content (text and graphical elements) and 50% advertising content. The percentages will vary slightly from issue to issue but that is the usual breakdown. Of the advertising content about half goes to cover the cost of production (printing, paying the contributors and whatnot) and the rest is profit. A 64pp magazine will have about 32pp of advertising, sixteen of which should cover the cost of production.
The numbers I used to construct the chart were from Print Pelican’s automated cost calculator. I chose Print Pelican after an extensive search for magazine printers. They have the best reputation and price structure for short-run magazine printing of any printer I checked out and there were many. They also have an excellent quality product; I ordered samples and was very much impressed. The numbers were collected in mid January 2009, and are based on an 80# Gloss Cover, 80# Gloss Text, Saddle Stitched, Subscription Card-black. The numbers may have changed some since then, but it doesn’t change the concept.
In the chart, the dotted lines represent the cost of printing and mailing (using Print Pelican’s mailing service) minus a two dollar per issue subscription charge ($24 per year). The surprising thing was how few subscriptions were required to negate the need for high priced ads.
The highest per page need for ad dollars doesn’t go above $320 for the 64pp magazine (16pp of ads to cover costs). That makes an eighth page ad come to forty bucks. ($319.74 per page @ 64pp, $310.70 per page @ 48pp, $265.13 per page @ 32pp) Mind you now, that is the highest need for ad dollars per page for 64pp magazines and under. Ad dollar needs fall off before and after the points indicated on the chart.
Most printers use an 8-up (& 8 down) printing method so you’ll probably notice that it is sometimes less expensive to print a magazine, excluding mailing costs, with page counts that are multiples of sixteen. For example, try 1000 copies of 64pp vs. 68pp on Print Pelican’s calculator. That’s why the chart shows 32pp, 48pp and 64pp. The 128pp is there for comparison.

click to view larger image

It’s hard to believe that I haven’t posted to this blog since July 2008. A lot of things happened last summer that required more time than I had to give so I had to give up a few things for a while in order to take care of them.

First, the director of the Writers Studio, Scott Foran moved to California and left me in charge of the group. That was a lot of responsibility and required time to get adjusted to. A great deal of things goes on behind the scenes that have to be coordinated. Even as the assistant director, I had no idea how much was involved.

Next I was recruited to a meeting of local artists to help start a regional artist guild and ended up on the board of directors. Helping put this group together, conducting fund raisers, doing research and attending meetings was and still is very time consuming, but the project is coming together nicely. It’s such a great group of creative people and we have two towns actively striving to have us locate in their downtown areas. They’re actually giving us buildings to use rent free.

Over the next several weeks I’ll be writing about our progress, what we’re doing for fundraisers, research I’ve conducted on how to start a print magazine on a shoestring budget and a behind the scenes look at the details of how some books got to be best sellers.

The art guild’s website is: www.convergenceartguild.com