Good luck and please post the submission guidelines soon.
There won't be any for a long time, if there
ever will be. My long term
ideas require locally based writers and no more than two per magazine.
You're right. Printing a magazine is not for the future. Look around. How many of your peers actually read magazines these days? If your avatar is you, you look fairly young, so your peers should - if they're anything like the millennials and the Y-generation around here - mostly consume digital media.
My first is a magazine directed at all ages. Free, available to anyone who sees it.
More so, it will be written in a
style suitable for them...
No, not everyone is like this, but more and more people will go mobile. It will creep up in the ages. Over the next ten years I expect most news content to be consumed digitally.
10 years is way more than enough time to make this a success, then add mobile offerings in a similar vein.
I'm a geek who spent the last decade looking at and by virtue studying the technology (and its subset mobile) market. It's been a ridiculous obsession. I can write a book off the top of my head about user experience, so to speak, and how important it is. I think traditional print in certain categories fail on the user experience.
Yet even so, we have a regional car paper, which exists only as an advertisement vehicle for every auto related business in 200 miles (basically a classifieds with a hot woman on the front). They pay to be included and the mag charges $1. But this is a user experience that isn't yet matched on the web. (It can be, but isn't. Local apps and websites haven't taken off yet, though I expect they will one day...)
My point being, magazines can be very profitable when certain criteria are met...
Your problem is going to be developing an initial template for the look of the magazine, and finding ways to distribute it digitally - if you go that route. You're not going to see that much savings because the costs were never really in the printing. It's the content creation and distribution that costs. I think the 60 rule is still applicable, even for a fully digital magazine.
It's not about 'print savings' vs digital. It's about free content vs free content. It's about flipping pages vs using a web browser and using Google and deciphering through all of the spam and unhelpful junk. It's about local content vs generic content. It's about easy to read content vs complicated and long articles.
I'm not saying these ideas will hold up. But... I do like how the iOS has made Indie app development a profitable thing... For most devs? Of course not. For a small subset who did something new? Yep.
I've been to three women's houses in the last couple of weeks. Each one had a copy of that women's magazine there. This is a new magazine. It's a seemingly successful magazine. It's a local magazine. It has general and local content. And all three women had smartphones and laptops or PCs that they used religiously for reading, including the type of content Blush does.
http://www.blushmag.net/
stash it in your bag and soak up little snippets as you can
My plans are still a good bit different from that mag though. Blush is really a
legacy magazine at heart. But even so, they're not unaware of the effect.
Trust me, I am thinking of the reasons why someone would want to pick up a magazine off a shelf at a gas station or restaurant. I certainly don't, unless I
have to.
Thanks for your opinions. I truly appreciate them, since they force me to defend (test) my own ideas. More so, maybe an app and website are more urgent than I previously thought...
Oh and btw, you may find this ironic, but it's a mobile tech focused magazine.