Jeffrey Fisher <jeff.jfisher at gmail.com> wrote:
"Could you guesstimate an annual budget for the kind of pub that would be worth doing?"
15 years ago it cost about 50 cents per piece to color print and bulk mail a 36 page magazine printed on glossy stock with photographs, in quantities above 300,000. Bulk postage may have gone up since then, but not as much as first class.
BobW
On 8/21/07, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>
> On Aug 21, 2007, at 1:18 PM, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>
> > Oh, I agree, but as I just said in my response to Doug, better to
> > spend your
> > money on the writers (and editors) than on printing and distribution.
>
> Printing & distribution aren't that expensive. It's editorial product
> and marketing that are expensive. People have come to expect
> everything on the web to be free, which except for business
> journalism and porn, means downward pressures on quality.
Interesting. It makes me wonder why, if the major American newsweeklies are spending so much money on product, they suck so bad. Is it that they spend too much on marketing? And if it's not that expensive, I don't see any good reason not to do a print weekly, if there's a market for it. OH, wait. Maybe it's because they have no idea what they're doing.
In any case, unless I'm missing something, we're just back to what we sort of agreed before: the trick is finding the money.
Could you guesstimate an annual budget for the kind of pub that would be worth doing? I have a couple of ballpark figures in my head, but I was never privy to the budgets of the ezines I worked for in the past (except that one was very small and the other was pretty big).
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