“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
— A.J. Liebling
For any of us who have seriously thought about running a magazine, there is now MagCloud. Using print-on-demand (POD) technology, it allows you to create the magazine and then let them take care of printing and subscriptions. Any margin you add goes straight into your Paypal account.
I seriously considered this a few years ago using traditional magazine models for a technology.lifestyle magazine which was being set up by a local journalist. It didn’t go anywhere at the time (even though I offered to write for free) and then I started blogging (and to be honest, my ‘free’ writing output just seems to go up and up).
There’s something to be said for dead-tree editions. With POD, they’re much less likely to be out of date and there’s something nice about dead-tree. I even considered writing some of my short games for LateGaming in a magazine format because of the costs and size of book you have to justify for the standard hardback.
Even just as a promotional vehicle, it lends itself well as it may not be as cheap as a 2000-copy print run, but just being able to order five of them (albeit at an incrementally higher unit cost) has serious advantages to the small operator.
So whether you want to launch your own magazine or whether you just want a single copy of “Northern Ireland Executive Business Professionals Journal” with a dynamic photo of yourself on the cover for the coffee table in order to impress visitors, MagCloud would seem to be a winner.