New service brings Print-On-Demand to magazines
The magazine business is a tough one to break into. Even tougher are literary magazines. A majority never see a profit (even the successful ones) and many simply shut down because of rising costs, dwindling sales and a strained business model (you can only sell so many MFA program ads).
MagCloud just might make publishing that literary magazine you’ve been dreaming about a little closer to reality. I initially caught wind of this cool new service via this post from the if:Book blog.
According to MagCloud’s homepage, the process appears to be simple:
MagCloud enables you to publish your own magazines. All you have to do is upload a PDF and we’ll take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more.
And the price seems to be fair as well – $0.20/page plus the cost of shipping.
Isn’t the new trend going digital?
It does appear that media of all formats (including print) is going digital. However, there is still a market for print magazines, just as there is still a market for print books. The Print-On-Demand model for book publishing has really done wonders for many struggling authors by making the barriers to entry that much lower.
Will the same model work for magazines? I don’t know. It’s too early to tell. As MagCloud gets more popular and maybe even a few famous magazines under its belt, we might see the marketplace become flooded with magazines created by everyone and their uncle. Of course there will always be a few gems, but the wading pool to get to them will be filled with mostly filth.
Final thoughts
I personally haven’t touched a print newspaper in a long, long time. I get most of my news by reading the online version of the New York Times on both my computer and iPhone. Ironically, there are still a few magazines I subscribe to and enjoy reading regularly. While my personal experience is by no means a litmus test for success, MagCloud just might have something here.
If they can significantly lower the operating costs and waste produced by most traditional magazine publishers, then I think they’ll succeed (at least, in theory they should succeed). But there are lots of other forces at play and only time will tell how all this plays out.
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