How to leverage collaboration, readership focus, multi-channel marketing, cross-promotion, and digital strategies to make your print magazine a success
Does print still sell in the digital age?
Your reasons to publish a print magazine could be any of a spectrum of possibilities from promoting your business, to sharing your hobby, to establishing thought leadership, to education or supporting your vision for social change. Or many other things. But if you want to sell your print magazine, then before you get down to creating your content, designing your layout, choosing your paper and developing your distribution channels, you need the answer to a more fundamental question: does print still sell in the digital age?
The answer could be, “Yes.” But it isn't straightforward. Whether you're self-financing your magazine project, running a crowdfunding campaign, or you've drummed up other investment, to make a success in print in the 21st century, you need to adopt a multi-pronged approach to marketing and promotion which includes broad scope collaborations and a digital dimension. You'll need to be inventive, innovative, engaged, and above all, collaborative.
A new model for print magazine distribution
The days of a linear flow from the printing press to the distribution center to the retailer to the reader have long gone. Especially for the small indie press. But that doesn't mean you can't sell your print magazine. It only means that you need to drop the outdated 20th century model and adopt an approach which is in tune with the way the world and business works now.
Before we explore the five strategies which will help you make a success of your print magazine in the 21st century, let's first assess a few realities of the traditional print to consumer supply chain and how they impact the small or independent magazine producer.
- The commission conundrum — these days, you'll be hard pressed to find a retailer or stockist who will buy outright. Retailers will only take stock on commission. So, income is entirely dependent on a percentage of sales flowing back to the publisher — that's you — from the retailer via the distributor, with everyone taking their cut en route. This also means that whereas risk was once shared across the supply chain, it lands squarely, 100 percent, on the shoulders of the publisher now.
- The pay-to-sell problem — several distributors now charge upfront fees per copy of your magazine and have high-threshold minimum quantities. So you end up paying to sell, which doesn't always work out.
- The display dilemma — even if you bypass the distributors and go direct to the retail outlets, you'll often be charged for high-value shelf space. While your magazine has more chance of selling if it's positioned in a prime spot — eye-level, front-facing — paying for the privilege is an added risk and cost.
- The advertising impediment — most magazines rely on selling advertising space to either fund themselves or at least offset production costs. But the hard truth is that you'll struggle to sell advertising space until you can demonstrate significant distribution and sales. Advertising can definitely pay, but it's a secondary strategy to deploy once you've achieved some success.
Feeling disheartened? Well, that's not surprising. That was the bad news. But there's no reason why, as an independent print magazine publisher, you should try to compete in the traditional framework. You have powerful, proven, and effective alternatives available. So, time for the good news.
Strategies to sell your print magazine in the 21st century
Your first step to success with your print magazine may be a change of mindset. You'll need to make a gearshift — if you haven't already — from the ‘competitive gains' approach to the ‘mutual gains' approach. This has always been the firm foundation of good business-to-business (B2B) practice and is now the heart of independent publishing.
1. Creative collaboration
The first step in this direction is to form a coalition with other independent publishers. A good place to start is The Indie Publisher Club. You'll find an active and supportive community of other independent print magazine publishers who share experience, advice, contacts, trade insights, practical tips and more. But most importantly, they collaborate together to create advertising syndicates, share market boosts in their newsletters, and other collective efforts to mutual advantage. The only condition of membership is that you already publish an independent magazine.
You can also reach out individually to other publishers in your field. The easiest way to find them is through Google search. The following searches return good results:
- Directory of independent magazines
- Independent [insert a subject] magazines
- List of independent magazines
Find out the name of the editor and shoot them an email asking if they'd be interested in collaborating on mutually beneficial promotions. You'll be surprised by how many will be keen to talk to you, even if your distribution figures are still low. If they're having any degree of success themselves, then it's probably at least in part because they've already figured out the value of collaboration.
2. Reader focus
The most common — and often disastrous — rookie error that we see in start-up print magazine projects, is the wrong focus. It's understandable that you start out with a focus on your great idea, on the content you want to create, and the objectives you want to fulfill. But it's a big mistake. Why? Because if that's your approach, you will be the only person who reads your magazine!
The remedy is to make sure that right from the outset your focus is entirely reader-centric. Yes, you have a big idea, a content plan, and a direction for your publication. But if it isn't already based on market research, you had better make sure that it's guided by it.
If you don't know who your readers are — their age, social and economic status, habits, hobbies, political persuasion, lifestyle preferences, and core beliefs — then you won't be able to write or commission content that speaks to their needs and interests and draws them into the fold. So, you'll need to invest time and money in finding this information out. You can do a lot of this leg work yourself using your social media channels, running surveys via your email lists, and looking at the demographic analyses of other magazines and channels with a similar theme to yours. You can also outsource a good deal of the effort to qualified and reputable market research agencies. Dollars spent on thorough market research are always well spent.
Once you know who you're publishing for, you can tailor and tweak your content, your editorial style, your branding, and your voice to communicate your big idea more effectively and persuasively. Unless you know who you're talking to and how to speak to them, all your other efforts will be in vain. So, from the first step, make your efforts reader-focused to give yourself the best chance to sell your print magazine.
3. Your magazine is a platform, not a product
Think a moment about any magazines to which you subscribe or to which you have subscribed in the past. We'll wager that—whether you took note of it or not—those magazines didn't survive on the old sales-and-advertising-revenue model. Very few do; or ever have for that matter. Here are several indicators you may have noticed with your print subscriptions that show the magazine wasn't in itself the product, but a platform for other products and services which brought in the lion's share of the publication's income:
- Inserts offering other products at discount prices for subscribers—these may be books, special editions, giftware, binders, bookmarkers and coasters, even garden and household plants or reduced admissions to art galleries, museums, and events, depending on the magazine's target demographic. Often, these products are manufactured and retailed directly by the publisher or they have an affiliate agreement with a third-party.
- Courses, subscriber-only events, and paywalled digital content—this is a powerful strategy to sell “information products” which can be laser targeted because you know exactly who your subscribers are, what they will like, and how much they're willing to pay.
- Incentives to advocacy—among the most common and successful of these are coupons which the reader can use to give a subscription as a gift, or cash, subscription discounts, and prizes offered to readers who bring other readers into the fold. Again, it's not so much the new subscription that carries the value per se as the possibility of upselling highly-targeted secondary offers to them.
- E-commerce portal—in many ways, a lot of magazines act like catalogs, running articles and features which link to related products and services online via a scannable QR code.
Essentially, you should regard your magazine as a platform which you can build other business opportunities on. This way, you can scale up your profits and your outreach. And a percentage of that profit can plow back into the development of the platform. Over time, you develop a feedback loop whereby the more product and services you sell, the wider the circulation of your magazine becomes, thus boosting the upsell. Because the publication is the front-facing brand and platform, as your second-level business grows, it helps you sell your print magazine.
Of course, deciding on what business you'll build on the back of your magazine needs careful thought. You may not wish to invest in physical product and it may not be appropriate to your magazine's content, style, and readership. In which case, you could run events; or offer education courses, training sessions, or consultancy. A brainstorming session with your team should soon turn up several viable options for research and development.
4. Cross-promotional proficiency
You can leverage others' success to mutual advantage by forming cross-promotional partnerships. The key here is to approach potential partners who operate in a related not an identical vertical and to build clear mutual advantage into the proposal. The idea isn't to “steal” your partner's audience. It's to share your audiences together to everyone's benefit.
For example, a magazine or business which deals with natural history and a magazine or business focussed on gardening may be a good match. Likewise, a sports magazine or business could partner successfully with a travel magazine or business. Another good fit might be a movie review magazine and a streaming service, for example.
Popular and proven ways to deliver these partnerships are through mutual advertising deals to attract dual subscriptions. So, to use one example from those suggested above, a percentage of natural history enthusiasts who see the gardening magazine advertised will also subscribe to that, while a percentage of gardening enthusiasts who see the natural history magazine advertisement will likewise subscribe. This is a win-win for everyone concerned and helps your partner to boost sales as much as it helps you to sell your print magazine. Other cross promotional opportunities are guest editing, sharing space in newsletters, and limited time offer discounted dual subscription packages.
5. Doing digital right
Yes, it's a printed publication; so what has digital got to do with it? In the 21st century, digital has everything to do with it—but you must do it right. So, let's look at how your digital presence and activities can help you sell your print magazine.
First up, don't lock all your digital content behind a paywall. Yes, you can have paid-only access to in-depth digital content to complement your print magazine and as part of your secondary business model. But if you simply offer another paid-for version of your magazine online, you're missing the point. As all successful self-publishers know—especially those who have grown up in the age of the Internet and content marketing—the best way to make any collateral online is by giving and sharing. Relevance is the keyword, not revenue.
So, how does this translate in practice? It means that you establish and maintain branded, interlinked digital properties such as your magazine's website, your magazine's blog, and your social media accounts, an email newsletter, and a video platform. The purpose is to cross-fertilize all your channels and boost engagement. So, you can't just set these channels up and walk away. For that reason, if you're a solo entrepreneur or have only a small team, you should select the digital media that you're most comfortable with, that has the strongest appeal to your readership, and to whom you can frequently develop, share, and curate first-class content. The focus your energy and resources on that one, two, or three channels.
You digital and social media platforms will help you to build a community around your magazine, drive traffic both ways, and draw more people into your secondary sales funnels. The social media environment is also an excellent opportunity to find and develop mutually beneficial promotional opportunities to further help you sell your print magazine.
Ready to launch your print magazine or need more help? Talk to us!
At QinPrinting, we've been helping creatives just like you to develop and print successful magazines for over 25 years. Our list of repeat-buying clients — many of whom have held active accounts with us for over a decade — are testimony to the effectiveness of our high-quality print products and the quality of our customer service. Get in touch today to discuss your print magazine needs and request a competitive, no-obligation quote. We can't wait to contribute to your magazine's success. Let's talk!
