You may want to start a magazine yourself, but a little help from the outside can help you go a long way. Here are a few partners that could help you run your new magazine successfully.

In another post of mine, Starting a Magazine – Planning and Execution, I’ve mentioned the two most important partners that you would need when you launch a magazine by yourself. Here are a few other partners that you are quite necessary for a start-up company that wants to launch its own magazine.

Circulation Agencies

Creating a magazine is a difficult task, and requires a lot of effort. But all that effort can go to waste if you don’t know how to circulate your magazine. Magazine Circulation is to a magazine what SEO is to a website. You can have the best content money can buy on your pages, but what good is great content unless you optimise it enough so people can read it, enjoy it, and come back for more. The next time you go to a newsstand vendor or a magazine stall, ask the vendor to recommend a few good circulation agencies to help distribute your magazines. Once you speak to a few stalls, you’ll have a list of five to ten good circulation agencies you can contact and partner with. Speak with different circulation agencies and find out the terms and conditions on which they work.

Remember though, that circulation is a dirty job with a lot of secret hidden agendas and dark paths, and you usually never get paid for your magazines at the scheduled time of month. So maintain an aggressive yet good rapport with your circulation team, or chances are, a rival magazine may pay someone to keep your magazine off the stands! But no matter what, be wary of your dealings with circulation agencies and always have a backup plan, unless you want to risk storing all your magazines in a storeroom for the rats to read. There’s a lot more you need to know too, but I guess time will teach you all the strategies and secrets of circulation.

Subscription Agencies

A magazine breathes and gets its life through marketing activities, but for spurts of “pocket money” especially at the early months of your company, magazine subscriptions can play a lifesaver. To someone who doesn’t understand how subscriptions work, it may seem mysterious considering the low costs at which the magazines are given away and the additional gifts that come with them, but every move involved in the magazine industry is a strategy, and getting a high number of subscriptions can actually give the publisher a lot more than just money. If you can’t get subscriptions yourself, partner with a good subscription agency and let them handle all the activities for you. A good agency will also be able to bring in a lot of subscribers for you, at a small commission fee, of course.

Delivery and Mailing Agencies

When you start a magazine, you would be mailing a significant number of copies of your magazine every month to subscribers, agencies, clients, prospective clients, and a lot of other people. Sometimes, the number of copies distributed every month can number in thousands of copies. Partner with a good courier agency or mailing agency, so they can save your time, and also reduce the costs by a huge extent. And once you’ve partnered on a long term with a good delivery agency, not only will you ensure that your copies are delivered efficiently and on time, you can also save a lot of time on the inserting of magazines and pasting the addresses. After all, time is money, and every minute saved is a minute earned!

Digital Printing and Colour Testing Agencies

You may think you could spend an entire month working on your magazine, and take the magazine straight to your printer at the end of the month and have a ready magazine waiting for you on your next visit back to the printer. But it really doesn’t work this way.  If you want to create beautiful, well designed magazines every month, you need to spend a lot of time to ensure that your magazine looks good.  Partner with a good digital printing agency and colour test your prints every few days. A few good digital printers even have options to set the colours to match the original bulk printing colour and quality of printing presses, be it web or offset types. It may cost more, but it’s worth the money. This way, you can ensure that your digital prints will look exactly the same as your final prints. By tying up with a digital printer, and working on a contract basis, you can get better rates and also ensure that your regular digital printer knows your exact requirements, which can save you a lot of time and money in the long run.

You would also require screen printers or digital printers as per your preferences and requirements to print your business cards and envelopes.

Hardware and Systems Agency

When you start a publishing house, you need many systems and software to ensure that your team can stay in tune with the current innovations and available software. This isn’t really a critical requirement if you or one of your team members know their way around new innovations in technology and how to install hardware and software. If you can handle this yourself, then you can skip this requirement.

Legal Advisors

Depending on the type of magazine you intend to start, this can play a crucial part in the process. If you intend to start a political or news magazine, then you would definitely need to partner with a good legal advisory or even hire a team full time. But on the other hand, if it’s a typical lifestyle magazine, you may need a legal team mostly to prepare your contracts, employment terms and conditions, etc.

The different partners that I have mentioned here would include almost all the media partners you would need to ensure that you have a publication free of worries and troubles in the long run. But then again, every individual magazine has its own requirements. Most media houses already have internal teams for each of these requirements. But as a fresh start-up magazine, ask yourself what you would require internally and externally, as a media partner, to ensure that your magazine takes off and runs successfully without any glitches.

Click here to read about the Six Essentials and Requirements to Start a Successful Magazine.

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What are the requirements of starting a magazine? What is the planning behind a successful magazine, and how do you execute it well? Find out here.

If you’ve read my two earlier posts on starting a magazine, The Beginners Guide to Starting Magazines and Understanding Publishing Requirements, you would be able to set a good foundation, and would be ready to launch a magazine, and a publishing house. A firm foundation is always a good start, but foundations are no good unless you have a good plan to make use of the foundation. Starting a publishing house involves legal procedures and official documents, but starting a magazine requires great planning and perfect execution. In this post, I’ll tell you the most important criteria to run a successful magazine business.

There are two primary requirements, other than passion and determination, to run a good media house. You will need the Right Team, and the Right Partners.

The Right Team

You may have watched a lot of movies over the years, and you may have seen a lot of one-man army movies where the good guy vanquishes an entire army of bad guys in one and a half hours of screen time. Those scripts make for great movies, but reality is far different from those scenarios. If you intend to start a magazine, you can’t do it all by yourself. I’m not saying it’s not possible. All I’m trying to say is that it is inefficient. You could start a magazine yourself, or with a friend, and you could spend endless nights and long days working on all aspects of the magazine production yourselves, and may still be able to bring out a great magazine. It works, believe me, I’ve been there and done that.

But over time, you’ll understand that your talent can be put to better use by focussing on a particular aspect like writing, or designing, or perhaps, marketing. By doing this, not only would you be able to learn more about a particular niche of magazine publishing in detail, but you also have a responsibility to achieve the targets and follow deadlines. If you’re writing and marketing a magazine, chances are, you may spend more time writing and less time running around making money, or vice versa. And this could lead to imbalances in successful magazine requirements. Sometimes, great multitasking capabilities can actually turn out to be a shot in your own foot.

Use one-man or one-woman army tactics only if you have no choice, or can’t afford an exhaustive team. But then again, I’ve said this earlier, running a magazine is expensive business. If you don’t have the money or don’t think you can be successful soon enough, it’s better not to enter this field in the first place. But then again, don’t let me stop you from pursuing your dream. Think about your options, and ask yourself if you’re ready to take the leap.

Get in touch with people you know for recommendations, or talk to a good hiring firm, and hire people that you can gel with. But you have to be careful about your first set of employees. After all, they are going to be the benchmarks in their particular fields. You need leaders who are passionate and willing to trust you to lead them to greener pastures. But at the same time, they should be independent enough to take great decisions for the benefit of your company. This is crucial, and in most cases, can go awfully wrong.

One bad apple can spoil your entire basket, and a month later, every single one of your employees may walk out on you if you pick the wrong team. I could go on here, but you know what they say, you’re not going to know what the Sistine Chapel smells like unless you’ve been there. So, you’ve got great tips on picking a team in this post, go figure the rest. It’s your world, your dream, and your instincts that should guide you to your dreams.

The Right Partners

Running a magazine requires a lot of effort from several divisions. And chances are, you wouldn’t be able to handle all those requirements internally. There are two important partners that you could use, and I’ve mentioned them below. For any other partners you may need, you can see the link that I’ve added at the bottom of this post.

Printing Press

Printing of a magazine is one of the primary divisions that is almost always outsourced to a printing press. A good printing machine can cost millions of dollars, and as a start-up company, instead of investing in a low-cost printing machine, partner with a high-quality printing press. Speak with a few printers in your city and find out if you can look at them as long term partners.

Find out about their delivery timelines, the sort of machines they use, and the paper options they offer, and the other printing options like number of colours, effects, etc., and the different fancy paper cutting options they can provide. One of the easier ways to find a good printer is by flipping through the pages of leading magazines available in your city. Find out where they get their magazine published, and there’s a good chance that you may be able to pick a good printer right away.

Marketing Agencies

You have to understand this well, you cannot run a magazine on your personal investment forever. If you intend to do that, you’re really not cut out to be a businessman. You need to create a source of revenue generation that can bring back money to your office, and sustain your daily bread and butter. For this, you need an excellent marketing team, and the best marketing teams are really expensive, even if they’re worth it.

To save costs on marketing teams, you can partner with another media house, or with a marketing agency, and pay them a monthly commission and perhaps, even a retainer fee, to generate revenues for your magazine. But not all of them are good, so be wise when you go on a selecting spree. But as a word of caution, know that marketing agencies will also work with other magazines just like yours, and you can actually end up killing your own company if you’re not careful about the other magazines that are marketed by your marketing agencies. My tip to you is this, hire a marketing agency when you start a magazine, but only until your company is established enough to have its own marketing team.

These are two of the most important partners that you would need when you start a magazine, on a lower budget. But the list doesn’t end there, in fact, there are several other partners that you would need to ensure that your magazine runs smoothly, and at a lower cost than regular publishing houses.

Click here to read the next part of this article on Partners that you would need when you Start a Magazine.

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So are you ready to start a magazine? Here are all the tips that anyone could ever need to start a magazine.

If you’re still convinced that you’re ready to start a magazine after reading my introductory post on The Beginners Guide to Starting a Magazine, and just as enthusiastic about launching your magazine, then this post will definitely help you further in starting your own successful magazine. My earlier post would surely have revealed the high odds of owning a successful magazine, but fret not, if you know how to go about it, you’d definitely be able to launch and run a successful magazine.

Before I go into the technical requirements of starting a magazine, I really must tell any entrepreneur about the emotional and physical needs of starting a magazine. On the other hand, if you’re an entrepreneur that’s backed well by a long, glowing resume, and a big venture capitalist, well then, good for you, life can be just a bit softer on you. But wherever the money comes from, you’ve got sleepless nights and tough decisions to take in the years to come, and sometimes, even hard work may not give you the positive results you expect or want.

Unfortunately, passion alone isn’t enough to run a successful magazine. Sometimes, your core team may have differences with you and you may have to sever ties, which can make circumstances quite ugly. I’ve been there and done that, and the road’s tough. There were days when I had to partner with companies even if it wasn’t profitable for me. But I had to take on the opportunity in the hope of continuing my dream. But years down the lane, it would all be worth it. At times, it is completely acceptable to take one step back, to jump three steps ahead.

Today, I can actually decline a proposition to partner with a company if I want to, and I’ve walked away from several prospective clients just because our business ethics and communication styles aren’t compatible. Running a magazine isn’t only about the money. It’s a lot about crucial associations and partnerships. And it’s always about long term plans. What might seem easy and perfect today isn’t really the best option unless you can project a positive growth curve in the years to come. So what are the real issues that you need to look into when you start a magazine? Here are a few tips that can help you take the first few baby steps.

Legal Requirements

This is a very important part of launching a media publishing house. Amidst the enthusiasm and the eagerness to bring out a magazine, some people forget these crucial requirements. If you really are planning on staying around and playing the game for a long time, build the right foundation. If you’re partnering with a few friends, then have all the details including the expenses shared and the revenue sharing ratios recorded. Create exit options in the contracts between the partners, just in case things aren’t going to be cushy and nice in the years to come. And most importantly, register a company name and copyright all the relevant logos, etc. Speak with a legal advisor who knows and understands the working of a publishing house so you don’t end up with the short end of the stick.

Title and Magazine Registration

Almost all people who want a start a magazine don’t know this crucial piece of information. You cannot start a magazine legally unless you have registered the magazine with your country’s newspaper and magazine council or registrar. Now each country has its own government body overlooking these procedures, so I can’t really advise everyone here. In India, we have the Registrar for Newspapers in India (RNI) which overlooks all these procedures.

Your first move would be to verify the name or title of your prospective publication. Most government bodies have their own websites where wannabe publishers can find out if a magazine title is available for use in their country. This process is similar to looking for new domain names on the internet. You would have to apply for your title and get an approval to go ahead with the process. After the Title Verification, the next process is the Registration of the magazine. In India, as I said previously, you would have to obtain a registration number before launching a magazine from your local district commissioner’s office. Only after you receive at least a temporary registration number can you launch your first issue. But it doesn’t end here, there are a few more processes that you would have to involve in. But once you get the first step right, the respective authorities would be able to help you further and tell you how to go about the other formalities in detail.

The only case when you have the option of skipping a registration number is if you don’t intend to sell the magazine. You may find this anomaly in a few internally distributed company magazines, that are not sold on stands and don’t have a price tag on the magazine. The only risk in such cases is if someone else applies for a title that is the same as an unregistered company magazine, and gets all rights associated with that title. Under such circumstances, all the legal rights of the title ownership would pass on to the person who has registered the title under their name, and guess what, the legal owner of the title could also sue the company!

These are the two basic steps that you would have to cover in detail, before you give a thought about working on the magazine. So even before you sit down to work on your content, or hire teams, hold the thought and finish these two steps.

So what next? Well, it’s launching a magazine! Click here to read about Planning, Executing and Launching a Magazine.

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