New Business Idea Help

Have you thought of selling your idea to a publisher to enable it to get up and running and onto the shelves, if you don't know how to do this? If it is a good enough idea surely someone will want to produce it and then maybe you could still be involved in the content/writing of the mag? or how about taking on a smaller publishing partner? Good luck if you have identified a gap in the market....it needs to be sustainable tho...

PasturesNew wrote: »

In a recent job I was dragged into a magazine set up.

To make money any magazine needs to have advertisers. You need to define and know your target audience and advertisers very tightly. The biggest problem was that no advertiser would advertise in it unless they could see one and one didn't exist. Once you had one published and out there the response was either "we'll see how it goes for a few months" or "we've done our budgets this year, try us next year".

This particular magazine had good potential standing too. A local Chamber of Commerce produced a Newsletter, sent out to members. The members were advertising in it. The magazine would replace that and instead of being sent out to just the members (about 400) it would go out to every business in the whole town and up to 10 miles radius (about 2000). So it was affiliated with the local Chamber of Commerce, containing all their news too.

The magazine was to be full colour, the original newsletter wasn't. Yet still the advertisers from the newsletter didn't want to advertise in the magazine. People don't like change.

The magazine was owned/printed by the local printing firm. So there was no markup whatsoever on the printing costs, it was all done at cost/at a loss even. Design/layout was done inhouse too. So there were no suppliers to pay, no prices to negotiate.

It was pulled after 6 months due to lack of sufficient advertising.

It was the only B2B publication in the town and covering the area and it went out to every business in the town + 10 miles.

I would second everything in this post.

My partner and I developed the idea of a new magazine that was based on events in our area - it is quite remote and sometimes difficult to find out what's on so we saw a huge gap in the market. There were 2 other publications that could have filled this gap but they didn't; one was literally just full of adverts and had no content in it and the other was an old fashioned mag which felt more like an old person's newspaper.

We did TONS of research, both the local community young and old said 'brilliant!' 'we can't wait to see it' 'we think it will be great for the area' etc etc and the local businesses all said 'it's just the type of thing that we would want to put our name to' 'I don't want to advertise in a magazine that is just full of adverts, so your idea sounds brilliant'....

We set up the whole thing, I designed the magazine, I got a couple of local writers on board, I got a decent quote for print costs, I got a delivery company sorted and we set up as a limited company. All of the promo was done and we were about 2 or 3 months away from the launch date when we reapproached the businesses that we oh so enthusiastic about the idea - only to be told; we've used our advertising budget, we want to see a copy of it first, we'll see how it goes for the first 6 months(!) etc etc. Out of about 150 businesses only 5 were prepared to sign on the dotted line and our introductory rates were WAY below the other main publications in the area.

People do not like change and we feel that they totally missed out on giving our area a much needed fresh publication that would have worked for both young and old alike.

Quite a lot of the businesses we approached are now advertising in the other local mag that they all complained was 'full of adverts' and our research showed that this just went straight into everyone's bin!!!!!!! At this point we gave up :rolleyes: