Mags lite
25 September 2006. Inspired by the complete quotes.
I'm quoted in today's Grauniad by the honourable Bobbie, concerning Lulu and the creation of bespoke Print On Demand magazines.
As I've done countless times with others', my quotes have been (quite reasonably) cut down to what he saw as the salient points; here's what I gave as my full answer about why POD isn't used much right now in the magazine market, including a few other points that I thought were relevant, such as price and print quality, that were made elsewhere in the piece. POD gives hope to a few start-ups, I'm sure; though of course it won't revolutionise the marketplace any more than CafePress has Borders in crisis...
(starts, relevant part of my vaguely coherent email to Bobbie)
Niche magazines don't generally use POD, for a variety of reasons:
- per copy print costs are automatically much higher than with books, and economies of scale greater
- people generally spend less on magazines, so it's harder to find an audience who'll spend £6-8 on one copy of a magazine, unlike a book.
- the way people buy magazines is very different. People will buy a book based on reviews, blurb, cover - all these can be seen online without losing much in not having the physical object in your hand. But people (at least in the UK and USA - different in other cultures) will flick through magazines before buying, seeing what catches their eye, what is inside that issue. Not as easily replicated in flash or with PDFs.
- if you want ads in your magazine, you have to guarantee a certain level of print quality, which requires a printer overseeing the job carefully. You can't print the Orange logo anything but their pantone orange, or else. [Additional thought - you won't even get advertising if your audience is as undefined as POD purchasers are]
- magazines are periodical. You can leave your POD book online and available for years without any need to go back to it, if you want to. Magazines are more regular, and the information generally dates faster.
Of course some fanzines still use photocopy-on-demand - but the golden fanzine age has gone, eaten by the web's zero print and distribution costs.
That's not to say that no magazines will ever be produced POD - but writing, designing and making a magazine is much harder than simply writing a book and laying it out. Instead, niche magazines will have a set print run each issue (probably around 2000 for the trendy ones) and possibly reprint if it sells fast in the period that it's available.
[NB poor choice there of the word "will"; I didn't mean to futurecast, merely to use the Spanish present subjective, ie. 'as things stand, one would currently'. Silly me. I also meant to say that it being harder to produce would simply mean that fewer people would bother, compared to books. Not sure why I said "Instead", as those thoughts don't really follow on. Anyway, in a later email:]
Desktop publishing and digital photography have already gone a fair way to reducing start-up costs in terms of production - but distribution is just a faff really.
On the one hand, there's no reason why it [POD] couldn't work - it's just printing, after all, and I was recently involved in a pitch where the company digitally printed [NB not through Lulu] 10 copies of the proposed magazine to show what it'd be like (though they weren't cheap). But niche has become the internet's territory, whereas reading long tracts of fiction as if in a book still isn't an online thing, due to screen resolution and other issues.
(ends)