Anyone can write stories to fill the popular community magazine we talked about in the last post, a mag that will boost the sale of your ebooks online.
You need only mix wholeheartedly with the locals, picking up topics, and you’ll find writing for the mag becomes as intuitive as texting, and sales of ebooks will take off accordingly.
How many times have we heard it said since social media came along: We are all journalists now?
And we are.
As soon as we tap out the latest bit of gossip as we ride home on the bus we are the stoop-shouldered hack in his cluttered office pounding his keyboard to beat a deadline.
We want to be first with the news. Not only that, we want to tell a story.
And for a local mag you need only tell it in the kind of language you hear spoken around you every day, the language you use yourself.
That’s the kind of language that will tell your readers this magazine is for them. It’s congenial; they’ll feel comfortable with it. And they will readily communicate with you, send you in tips for stories, let you know when things are happening. Add to stories you’ve already started. And send you pictures on their smart phones.
And add to the sense of community. That’s what you’ll want to develop with your magazine; to be at the centre of things.
Get your book sales moving
Once you establish this easy rapport with the people around you, then you will get your book sales moving online. Readers sharing your outlook will want to see more. That is when things start to gather momentum.
But first of all you must take a decision: Do you want to print the mag, or run it online, or do both?
You would think the answer is easy.
Why would you want to print your mag when you can run it more cheaply online?
But the answer is: because both readers and advertisers prefer it that way.
Surveys have shown that both trust what they see in the printed version more than what they see online. They know that online things can change in an instant.
Even so, the online mag offers readers advantages:
· They can see videos.
· They can read the mag on holiday abroad.
· They can click on links to accompanying sites as well as to your books and ebooks online.
· They can click on links to advertisers where they can place orders, ask questions and pay for goods.
· They can leave comments about goods and services.
· They can call up back-numbers in the archives.
· And for you it is cheaper.
A formidable range of virtues.
So why print?
Advantages of the printed mag:
· It takes off immediately. It is in the public eye the moment it appears on shop counters and is dropped into shopping baskets. You don’t need to wait for word to get around.
· It is there every week or every month. Shoppers don’t need to be reminded to look for it, to key into a website.
· By seeing the mag on shop counters, advertisers feel confident their ads will be seen.
· The sight of the mags attracts fresh advertisers.
· Research shows that although the web has been popular for 30 years, people in the UK still prefer printed mags. Advertisers suspect that people will forget to key into digital ones. In their eyes it is like asking people to key in to see their ad. They may not. But if they see it as they turn a page they take notice.
· It displays the lay-out of ads and stories better than a mobile phone, the most common form of access to the web.
· It will lie around for a week or more, in waiting rooms, libraries, launderettes, takeaways, for casual browsing.
· Supermarkets have all their products online, but they still hand out free mags.
So why not pay to get it printed, a professional job?
· It is quicker to print it yourself. Sending it to a printer can take a week unless you pay extra. Your ads and your news items are date sensitive.
· It is cheaper, and you have the machine standing by for other printing to offset the purchase or the leasing price.
· You can’t ‘editionise’—change pages for different districts. Change two pages for the price of one new master, 35p.
· Individual ads can’t be run off as flyers.
The perfect answer: Make the most of your material, print the mag yourself and run it online as well.
Cash in on advertising
As you would expect, journalists from newspapers that have gone to the wall are already setting themselves up with printing systems in spare rooms and garages to scoop up the available advertising.
They are delivering something like the old-style “parish pump” news, cheap and chatty homespun publications, frequently a single-handed operation, usually a monthly, more often now a weekly, carrying not just advertising but lively editorial as well, the small stuff of small town life.
But you don’t need to be a journalist for this kind of work.
To produce a good chatty publication you need no special training and hardly any cash. You don’t need any specialist knowledge or literary expertise.
Texting and emails have given us the ‘immediate’ informal style of writing that is ideal for the local mag.
You don’t need anything in the way of an academic background. And you don’t need a franchise.
All you need is a lively interest in your local neighbourhood and a readiness to get along with people. Elementary grammar and an appetite for making money keep the show on the road.
You might say: “I don’t know the first thing about printing.”
You don’t need to.
The digital duplicator is as simple to operate as a photocopier.
Sometimes called a digital printer or copy printer, it is the perfect machine for producing the magazine that will sell your ebooks. The A3 model (£15 a week to lease) will print two A4 full magazine-size pages at a time (each pass) and turn out up to 260 pages a minute using ink not toner. The A4 model (£7.50 a week to lease) will print the same number of A5 pages a minute. So there is no cheaper way of printing your publication. It is simplicity itself to operate, changing masters is automatic with no cleaning down involved, and the machine largely takes care of itself, running off the number of copies you have dialed in while you are busy with something else.
As fast as they are, there is no set-off (ink transfer) between pages descending into the out-tray; the soy-based ink dries almost instantly even though no heat is applied.
Apart from feeding the paper in-tray and lifting out the printed pages it is a push-button operation throughout.
A fraction of the cost
These are fast and robust printers that can turn out magazines at a gallop. You can read all about them online. We have always used Risograph A3 machines to run off local magazines. They can print bold enough for an A3 poster and fine enough for a wedding invitation card. The oldest one we have has now printed over 4,435,000 pages and has never needed more than routine servicing.
There are other well-known makes. All are as simple to operate as a photocopier, but at a fraction of the cost and would run a photocopier off its feet and into the ground.
With that same machine you will be able to print local histories, pub guides, books of short stories and poems, anthologies, annuals, flyers, posters, menus, and all kind of products for the local community, for which you can run ads in the mag.
It is possible to print in colour on a basic digital duplicator, but for that you need a separate drum for each colour or you need to acquire a more expensive machine that will print in more than one colour at each pass. For a local mag you don’t need to go to that expense, it’s surprising what impact you can achieve with black and white shading.
If you buy a refurbished machine you may be lucky enough to find it comes with a second drum anyway, red or blue, which would give you a nice bright colour for a front page masthead.
With the kind of manpower mentioned above you could manage the collating, stapling and folding by hand. But as you progress you might want to add a jogger, collator and booklet maker to make light of the work and allow more time for writing.
The machines are much sought-after by artists producing zines and the distinctive multi-colour Riso montages that sell for good prices on the web.