After devoting 2 months towards creating his first magazine (Sports for the Average), Shaheem Sutherland realized there were a lot of steps that he needed to complete in order to create a quality magazine. Due to this, Sutherland thought it would be a good idea to share what he learned with others who might be interested in creating their own magazine. Below you will find the steps Sutherland thought were the most important when completing this task.
- The first thing is having a niche: You want your magazine to be about a specific field/topic. This helps you to not be all over the place. For example, your magazine can be about sports, fashion, music, technology, etc.
- Next, come up with a name. This doesn’t have to be the next step, but coming up with a name for your magazine is very important.
- Most magazines usually have a table of content. Having a table of content is important because it allows your audience to get a quick and brief rundown on what to expect when reading your magazine. It also helps to keep everything in your magazine organized. This helps readers to find articles faster as well.
- Create several articles for your magazine. A magazine should have at least 4 featured articles. Including small sections that can inform your readers about interesting things or events related to the field of your magazine can be helpful as well. There’s nothing wrong with recycling articles that you’ve already created and posted online. This saves you time and allows die-hard fans to have copies of articles they may favor.
- Make sure your magazine has pages set aside for photos you want to feature and also for businesses that may want to place ads within your magazine. The ads might not come until later in your magazine’s future, but let’s speak it into existence.
- Figure out how you’re going to distribute your magazine. Are you going to make it available online only? Are you going to make it available in print only? Are you going to make it available online and in print?
- If you’re going to make your magazine available online, then you’re going to need to find a digital distribution platform you’re fine with using. Using a digital distribution platform is the most cost-efficient way to distribute your magazine without breaking the bank. If you do it this way, the way the sites get their money is by taking a small percentage from every purchase of your magazine. The digital distribution platform that Sutherland uses is MagCloud. Blurb, Issuu, and Joomag are a couple of other digital distribution platforms that you can use.
- If you want to make your magazine available in print, you’re going to need to find an affordable magazine publishing company. It is recommended to shop around before you make a decision, going this route can be pricey. Depending on the number of copies you want, you can pay hundreds to thousands of dollars for the copies you want.
These steps pretty much sum up the basic information you would need to know if you wanted to create a magazine. This is not detailed as there are other things involved when creating your magazine, but Sutherland pinpointed the things he thought were the most important when he went through this process. If you would like a detailed video and article about this process, let Sutherland know in the comments below.
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