Magazine.. should we launch!?

[magmom]

Line the money up first. As for 1,000 vs. 3,000, no one cares. That's too small.

TOTALLY agree with this! I am in my 3rd year and started with 10000 issues. Yes we took a lot back in the beginning but now we barely take back 50. For around $4000 you can print 10000 copies full color, glossy, 32 page, saddle stitched magazines.

It was just my husband and me (he with a full-time job working from home in the beginning and as of right now we still only have 5 people including us. For the first two years we had no sales people and 100% of our sales came from people picking up the (free) magazine around town and calling us because they wanted to be in it.

We had a friend that had been in the business and he gave us some GREAT advice. He said to try to get your distribution points in place before trying to sell. We started out with about 80 and now have about 170. We had about 6-8 ads in the first issue and lots of stock pictures with the articles and big fonts to take up space. This was a huge selling point when people contacted us about advertising. The first thing they would ask is how many we print and where is it being distributed.

It payed for itself by the 4th issue (barely but still). Fast forward to now we're at 56 pages and busting at the seams.

I won't bore you further unless you wanna know more...

[Encrypted]

My only concern before taking the loan is.. are magazine's going the way of the dinosaur due to the world wide web?

Please reply to those two concerns only: should we print 1000 first issue for a lesser loan and are magazine's soon to be extinct?

If your magazines are free I'd say go with 1,000 to show your magazines are of good quality. Then get some advertisers and print another 3,000. I don't really enjoy paying yearly subscriptions for magazines when I can get the same content online for free. However, since your magazine is free, I would gladly subscribe to it. I don't think magazines are going "dead", magazine companies just need to come up with new ways to make money other than through subscriptions, which is exactly what you're doing. Good luck.