How do you make sure your free local magazine will grab readers and advertisers with its first edition and instantly open up your second income stream, selling your ebooks online?
First of all you let them all know this magazine is for them, it will be taking up and looking into the topics they want to talk about, as well as carrying extracts of the local ebooks.
When advertisers see this they will know the readers will be watching what it carries like a hawk.
So you make sure you lead with an arresting front page story and a striking picture, and run some ‘tasters’ alongside to let everyone know there’s more appetising fare inside.
That’s the aim, we’ll come to how you do it in a moment. First you have to organise the magazine’s production.
Whether it’s the New York Times or the Hometown Magazine, it’s always the same.
Editorial.
Advertising.
Admin/accounts.
Printing.
Distribution.
And deadlines are what get the job done, so it’s best to stick to a schedule even though you are a small outfit, then you’ll be sure to end up where you want to be at zero hour.
Where do you start with your first edition?
To familiarise yourself with the digital duplicator/copy printer and to let people know you’re in business, you could run off a batch of ‘boost your business’ flyers and distribute them down the high street and throughout the shopping centres, offering 1,000 flyers for £20.
Satisfy any demand this produces and you might then be asked to print a brochure for a cluster of shops intent on pulling people into a particular part of town.
And very soon you have the start of an advertising base for your magazine.
Collecting advertising.
Send a story to your local Chamber of Commerce asking them to run it in their monthly newsletter telling members you’re in existence, and giving your phone numbers, email address, rates and date of first publication and advertising deadlines.
At the same time invite members to let you know when any of their staff are doing anything interesting, record-breaking or just plain crazy. Promise to publicise the chamber’s meetings and promote its endeavours.
If there’s a Business Directory for your area, go through it underlining every entry that has your telephone prefix and find the time on a quiet afternoon to start calling them all up, explaining what you are doing—bringing out a local magazine with, say, 50% editorial, 50% advertising—and giving your rates and deadlines.
Don’t forget, if you have to create an ad, both wording and art work, you should be charging extra; it takes time.
Start to educate your advertisers, in a subtle way. Jack Smith the butcher can’t just tell people who he is and where he is, everybody knows that already, but he does need to tell them what’s in his bargain barbecue packs and how much they cost. Everybody knows where Jill Brown is at Belle Boutique, but they don’t know what she’s got coming in from the fashion houses next week.
Get them to try to anticipate what people want, and to put out specials to attract new speculative shoppers.
Getting this message over is not only good for the butcher and Belle, it’s good for the readers, it will make them aware of the need to keep watching for bargains.
And it’s good for the magazine—something new showing up all the time.
Finding editorial
There are the usual contacts. There are the local parish and district councils who will send you their meetings agendas. The county police usually put out an emailed report every morning so make sure you are on the mailing list. The local chamber of trade or commerce will be happy to keep you up to date with developments, especially if its members keep gettingfree mentions all the time.
Let all these people know you are in existence and maintain regular contact with them, and keep reminding them you are always in the market for any funny stories, no matter how frivolous, that will make your readers smile. You don’t have to tell anybody where the stories came from.
Your public library usually keeps a list of all local clubs and societies, with secretaries’ names and email addresses. Note them all down and circularise them offering free publicity for any fund-raisers and upcoming events, and urge them to let you know if anybody is running in the London marathon or attempting to swim the channel. In particular ask for advance notice of any crazy record attempts or undertakings so you can be there with your camera. Funny stories are gold dust in journalism and you need to put feelers out for them all the time.
The Daily Telegraph has produced a book of them, Soundings from the Parish Pump, Amazon, £11.95, a celebration of little local difficulties. You can see how they brighten up a page.
You can also run an I-spy inviting readers to call or email you when they come across a story, and award a prize for the best tip-off. This can lead to a crop of off-beat and often funny stories, leaven for the heavier stuff from the council.
All those people with their smart phones will call in with snippets of news and suggestions for pictures from time to time. Your advertisers especially.
Run a ‘strap’ with your contact number and email address across the top or bottom of every page so they can’t forget.
A letters page is one of the most popular and important places in the magazine, and will give rise of all kinds of opinions. (Watch out for libel!) Often you will have to cut contributions, and at other times correspondence dries up. When it does it’s convenient to have an editorial so you can nudge things into life with your own suggestions—eg, “Would it be a good idea to…?” “Shouldn’t we be…?”
And there are your advertisers—the pubs, the shops, the merchants—they are face to face with the public all the time and will be happy to tip you off to a story if they know you will return them a favour whenever you can.
Find time to chat to all these people. You don’t need to confine the chat to the chamber of trade or the pub or the shop. They meet more people than most and can often pass you a story tip-off if not the full run-down.
Always keep space for any breaking story on efforts to improve social amenities, and drum up support whenever you can. Try your best to energise community spirit. Stay enthusiastic. Don’t dwell on ‘bad news stories’, except to show where set-backs are being overcome.
And show your face in the clubs, pubs and society meetings; conversation is where you find the germ of a story. Always ask the landlord what’s new when you order your first drink; and give the odd talk in the social clubs.
Encouraging tip-offs from readers is one of the best ways of getting in on a story when it first breaks. You’ll hear about it quicker from a reader than almost anyone else. And you’ll get the first reaction.
Let everyone see—readers, the council, the advertisers—that you respond to tips and suggestions and will always back every worthwhile endeavour, and you’ll find that bringing out a popular, sought after, well-read, well supported magazine is a breeze. Make it cheerful, funny when you can, upbeat and forward-looking, rally to the support of every community project, and everyone—advertisers especially—will be happy to see you succeed.
Stay on the good side of everybody. It may be tempting to pitch in with your penny’s worth but whoever you slam today could be somebody whose help you need in a few month’s time.
So try to keep everyone happy. By all means, ask the difficult questions on the readers’ behalf, that is your job, but take an impartial stand and report the answer you get. It will be up to the readers to make up their minds.
Distribution of the magazine usually costs very little. You leave batches with your advertisers (shops, hairdressers, pubs, reception areas) and distribute the rest among libraries, waiting rooms, schools, takeaways, laundrettes and any other public places where people find themselves with time on their hands.
Interviewing made easy
Often the most effective opening question is simply: “Can you tell me what happened?”
This throws the responsibility onto the interviewee to gather their thoughts and start putting into order what they know. While this is going on and while they are recounting events it’s best to let them carry on, so long as they stick to the narrative you are asking for.
Then you have the story in the witness’s own words and what they say will carry the ring of truth.
And the reader will be able to see ‘a true picture’ of what went on.
You will want to tick off Kipling’s six honest serving men: What and Why and When and How and Where and Who, but this will come about as a matter of course.
It’s permissible to ask the offbeat question if you think it could produce an lively response, but by and large the level-headed approach wins people’s confidence.
Always take care that you turn up for an interview looking presentable, nobody is going to trust you with information if they think you are a nut.
Making something out of nothing
Sometimes, as every weekly newspaper knows, there’s nothing very much happening. (“Nothing happened but it happened slowly.”) Then you have to resort to making something out of nothing. But it can be done. Buller Bateman in Breaking Story has a useful standby in his regular ‘While the Kettle Boils’ column, the weekly chat between two housewives turning over the local gossip and picking the council to bits. It’s expressive but not libellous and it scores because it is spoken in the language all his readers use; they are listening to themselves in fact.
So even the most mundane event can be turned into something bright and informative, especially if your readers know you are ready for a laugh when things go quiet.
Do what you can with what you’ve got now! This useful mantra for getting things done is an essential weapon in the journalist’s arsenal. Make the best use of everything. Write what you’ve got in a lucid, entertaining way (see next post) and you can be sure your readers will turn up in good time next week to pick up your new edition before the copies run out.
Once you achieve this kind of following, the Kindle ebooks you are advertising in the magazine and selling online will soon be finding a place in homes around your circulation area.
Always reserve the same pages for extracts from the books and for local poems and works of art, not forgetting children’s art from the local schools. It’s all part of maintaining a miscellany that makes your magazine different from most others.
An encouraging book to keep handy, is Writing Articles about the World Around You, Amazon Kindle £7.58. It tells you how people and places you know can spark ideas for hundreds of articles and has its own chapter on interviewing. It is full of suggestions for stories you can find by picking up the phone. You can always extend the ‘book section’ with short essays on these sort of topics. And very soon you could be running extracts from books written elsewhere in your county and publicising their presence on the web. This way your magazine extends its influence accordingly.