So have you always wanted to started a magazine, or is it just a a passing whim? Either ways, this post should help you understand the costs involved with the starting of a magazine in a much better way.

This post of mine is a continuation of How Much does it Cost to Start a Magazine? So if you’ve come by without reading the earlier posts, I’d suggest you start all the way from the beginning, The Beginners Guide to Starting a Magazine.

To the more informed ones who’ve followed my earlier posts, in this part of the post, we’ll continue with where we’ve left off. I’ve told you about the expenses involved with the editorial, marketing and the photography already, and here, I’ll tell you about the rest of the essentials and how much it could cost you.

Design Team

A design team comprises of designers, creative directors, and at times, illustrators. For a magazine to run successfully, the design team has to be competent enough to coordinate with the editor and the writers. But at the same time, they also have to be creative enough to come up with unique designs that aren’t just cut and pasted from other magazines.

Creativity, unique design creation and understanding of colour combinations are of utmost importance while hiring a design team. But most designers don’t really understand the most important aspect, that the designs created on the computer screen and the final design that appear in the magazine usually don’t look the same. Absorption of colours on paper can create significantly different looking colour combinations on paper, especially while working on gradients, or on CMYK and RGB options. And all these little tips and ideas actually make a big difference between a good magazine and a fabulous one. While hiring a design team, try to get people who have experience in print magazines. Expenses-wise, a good design team would cost you around the same as your editorial team.

Airbrushing and Colour Testing

Great magazines boast of having the perfect airbrush artists. Usually, it is the design team that works on airbrushing images and making images and people in the magazine look great. One tip you really should know is that every single image you use in your magazine definitely has to be airbrushed. It may look stunningly good on the computer screen, but it’s always going to lose almost half of that quality when you transfer it to paper.

Unless your design team is exceptional, outsource a very good airbrushing artist or top-notch designer to airbrush your images, especially your cover page. Remember, airbrushing is not an option, it is a definite requirement. Airbrushing artists can cost you quite a lot based on their experience and knowledge of print media. But then again, if you have a great design team, you wouldn’t be requiring an airbrush artist anyway.

Circulation Team

Just like advertising and branding a magazine, circulation too is an extremely variable expense. Depending upon how aggressively you want to promote a magazine at the point of purchase, you can spend the bare minimum or go all out and spend millions on a national scale. Basically, circulation of a magazine involves more than just distributing a magazine to newsstands and stores across your country. It also involves sticking of magazine posters, manufacturing little fancy magazine stands and clips with your magazine’s logo on it, and banners and small hoardings that can be hung over the newsstand. Along with this, some publishing houses also create branded shade umbrellas, and fancy awnings that are branded with the magazine logo. Additionally, you can also pay a significantly higher commission to the vendor for selling your magazines, or pay a bonus for every magazine sold, or just pay a retainer fee for displaying your magazine upfront in newsstands.

But all these methods are just like grains of sand in the ocean. Every day, circulation managers and executives come up with more unique ways to advertise and promote their magazine sales. To have a successful team that can come up with innovative ideas, you need to have at least one experienced circulation head or manager, and a few people to work on the circulation needs. Circulation expenses wouldn’t really be as high as your marketing expenses, but it would be a good option to hire an experienced team that already has a good rapport with the local newsstands and vendors.

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What are the expenses involved with the running of a magazine? How much does it cost to start a magazine and run it successfully? Find out here.

Over the last few posts, I’ve elaborated on all the requirements of launching a magazine, and now, you’re probably ready to read the part where we talk about the involved expenses. In either case, the last few posts of mine should help you understand everything there is about launching your own magazine even if you’re just a fresh entrepreneur who knows nothing about magazines, or how to go about starting them. Here is a list of posts I’ve written earlier that you definitely should read to understand everything there is about launching your own magazine.

1. The Beginners Guide to Starting your Own Magazine

2. How to Start a Magazine? The Requirements

3. Starting a Magazine – Planning and Execution

4. Partners you need when you Launch your own Magazine

5. Six Essentials to Start your own Magazine

With this information, you are probably ready to launch a magazine by yourself. And if anything does scare you even now, it’s probably just your nerves or your lack of experience. But we all have to start somewhere, don’t we? Do remember an important pointer that I’ve said before, running a magazine is expensive business. And to make matters worse, there’s a lot of competition. And money, at least in the beginning, comes in trickles. Unless you’re an exceptionally clever and shrewd entrepreneur who can make all the right associations, it is going to be a difficult journey ahead. And you need to put in a lot of effort, and need all the dedication and passion you can muster.

Now coming to the expenses involved with the running of a magazine, I’ve listed most of the generic expenses that you would definitely have to spend on. Any other expenses that may come across your way would probably be the added expenses involved with running a particular niche magazine like a travel magazine (which involves travel expenses) or a celebrity magazine (clicking celebs in compromising postures doesn’t come cheap, really!).

The different expenses that you would have to deal with, issue after issue, include:

An Editor

Just like how a ship needs a captain and an airplane needs a pilot, you need a great editor to steer your magazine in the right direction. Pick an editor with a lot of experience, or if you can’t afford a great one, hire an editor on freelance basis as a Consulting Editor. But yeah, even a consultant will cost you an arm. After all, a great editor can be the difference between a successful magazine and a miserable one.

Editorial Team

An editor may steer your magazine in the right direction, but you still need a great crew to assist the editor. A typical editorial team involves a lot of people, but for starters, you could do with a couple of feature writers, a copywriter and an executive editor. You could also take in a few interns on a stipend basis to help your short-staffed team, at least at the beginning.

Marketing Team

Marketing is the life-blood of any publishing company. And the faster you understand this, and harness the power of a great marketing team, the bigger your advantage of sustaining and profiting from your magazine. Most shrewd start-up entrepreneurs spend more on a powerful marketing team than on any other division involved in the magazine business. It’s a clever move, but could also backfire if the focus is shifted away from the real reason behind the success of a magazine, its editorial. For starters, get in touch with the biggest marketing man you can afford to hire, and see if you can work out a deal. Beyond this, hire a few fresh or less experienced marketing professionals from the city you’re based out of. And about other cities across your country, partner with freelance marketing professionals until you can afford them on a full-time basis.

Photography Team

We’ve been through this part in my earlier posts in this series, so this should come off as a clear pointer. Every magazine needs good photography to stand out of the crowd. If you’re alright with sharing images, and don’t really care if you use images that are also used by other low budget magazines, then stock images may be a decent option to start off with. Even stock options can turn out pretty expensive based on the exclusivity of the images you intend to use. When the money does come in, spend some money on producing your own photoshoots so you can move away from the tag of a low-budget magazine. Another way by which you could get good images for less is by creating partnerships with local photographers. Strike a retainer fee agreement for a certain number of images every month, and as long as you get good images, you’re going to have a good thing going on for you.

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What are the most important requirements to start a magazine? There are quite a few, and you need to focus on all of them if you want to make a difference in the media industry.

I’ve written quite a few posts in this series on starting a magazine and running a media house successfully. And if you would like to read everything there is about launching a new magazine, I would recommend that you start this series with this post, The Beginners Guide to Starting a Magazine.

After you’ve read my earlier posts and understood all the details, you should now be ready to know the real requirements of a magazine, not a publishing house, but a real magazine. So what are the different teams that you would require to run a magazine successfully? There are a lot of people and teams that you would need in the long run, but for starters, you could split the requirements into six basic essentials. In this post, I will briefly explain about each requirement. If you need any information about any of these details, or would like to partner with my organisation on the same, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

Editorial Requirements

Content is King. It’s been said before and it’s still something that’s of utmost importance. Pay a lot of attention to good content because a magazine won’t have any faithful readers even after a series of well branded advertising campaigns if the content’s no good. Unless you are an excellent editor, it would be advisable to hire an editor. The problem with most writers is that they can’t judge their own writing skills without spell check, let alone edit other writers’ work. It’s always difficult to edit your own work, unless you’re really good at what you do. Every magazine needs a few writers, a copywriter, and a couple of editors to work on the editorial content. You could skip a few people here to start off, but then again, can the others cope with the burden of overworking while maintaining the quality at the same time?

You have to think as a businessperson here, and not take someone’s word in this case. Think about it, you must have come across several magazines with atrocious editorial content and grammatical errors. Does that mean the boss is a loser? Nope, it just means that he or she trusts their employees way too much, and allows their writers to cloud their judgement. Don’t fall in this trap. Always get second opinions and surveys to understand what people want and how good your writers and editors really are.

Photography Requirements

If Content is King, then I can safely say that Photography is Queen. Just as magazines need good content to connect with a reader, magazines also need great photography to complement the content and enhance the visual appeal. Some magazines also do focus a lot more on the visual appeal of photographic images to sell their magazines. There are so many magazines that actually sell only because of the titillating images that are splashed on the pages of the magazine. Half the men’s magazines belong in this category. But its importance and requirements depends on the content and type of magazine you wish to start. You would be a better judge of the kind of photographic requirements, so plan your steps to cater to your magazine’s needs. Hire at least a couple of photographers, or partner with a photography agency to obtain the images for your new magazine.

Design Requirements

Good content may be king, and great photography may be queen. But they really can’t look their best unless they’re dressed up for the occasion. And for that, you need an excellent design team. Just like a great editorial team, you also need to invest in a quality editorial team that involves designers, creative minds, and art directors. The editorial and the design team usually works closely together, so unfortunately for your money, the design team is a requirement that you just can’t afford to miss out on.

Marketing Requirements

A business is only as good as the money it brings in. That sucks, because it just shows that creative minds can’t really make money without being shrewd and street smart. But unfortunately for the creative people, this fact is true and truly harsh. The golden goose of every magazine publishing company is the division that brings in the money, i.e., the marketing department. You could run the magazine on your personal funds for the first couple of years, but if you can’t sustain the magazine with external funds even after a while, then there’s no use of launching a magazine, is there? You really aren’t performing a charity service for your readers. Hire a good marketing team to bring in the advertisements to fill your pages, or partner with a good marketing agency to help you during your start-up phase.

Distribution and Circulation Requirements

You could publish a great magazine, but you also need to distribute the magazine to newsstands across your state or country so people can get a chance to read it. Partner with a few distribution agencies to circulate your magazine to the newsstands, and also hire an internal team to ensure that the magazine is delivered from the printing press to the distributors. Additionally, your internal team should also keep track of the magazines and ensure that the magazines are distributed well to all the stands, and are prominently displayed in the magazine stalls. Getting the magazines to be displayed prominently is dirty business, and can also cost you a lot of money. You’ll understand this in first person when you start your publication. Every country has its own circulation strategies and involved expenses, so talk to a few newsstands and you’ll know how to go about it.

Printing Requirements

Quality of the paper plays an important part, depending on the type of magazine you intend to launch. If you’re looking at a weekly news magazine, a newsletter, or a tabloid, your readers may not really care about paper and colour quality as long as you provide your readers with great content. On the other hand, if you’re planning to launch a monthly lifestyle magazine, your readers will obviously expect you to bring out a glossy, colourful magazine that can be shown off! So based on your requirements, hire a printing press that can satisfy your requirements, and your delivery deadlines.

You do have to understand that all of these above essentials are equally important, even if I may have given unfair attention to a few essentials. After all, a spacecraft may have thousands of parts, but there’s no way it can complete an expedition with total efficiency even if a single part is missing.

So if you really do want your new magazine to go straight ahead on the road to success, don’t miss any of these steps. Do all this, and you just may have a good chance of making it big in the media business.

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