Sounds cool. One of my ideas as a teenager was to make my own zine or magazine. Maybe with software today, I could make a magazine with little or no problem since desktop publishing is for the masses now.

I do think the greater issue is figuring out printing and distribution.

Well, without spending a ton of money on it; you could produce a zine or magazine with printing costs of $20 per copy, but it would be a challenge to get anyone to buy a $25 magazine when most magazines are going for less than $10.

I still have the idea of making my ANSI calendar into a paper calendar, but haven't really figured out how I'd go about getting it printed in a way I'd find acceptable that didn't also cost me a ton.

But I haven't looked into it particularly much, other than that, when people say, "make your own calendar!", they mean, "we'll print a calendar on the bottom, and you choose your pictures to put on top", which is categorically not what I need.

But, "Print a booklet that's calendar sized, and I give you the images that cover each page" should theoretically be easy enough. But it seems uncommon, therefore likely expensive.

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Re: Re: Retro Gaming Magazines
By: Adept to MATT MUNSON on Fri Oct 28 2022 10:54 am

Sounds cool. One of my ideas as a teenager was to make my own zine or magazine. Maybe with software today, I could make a magazine with littl or no problem since desktop publishing is for the masses now.

I do think the greater issue is figuring out printing and distribution.

Well, without spending a ton of money on it; you could produce a zine or mag

I still have the idea of making my ANSI calendar into a paper calendar, but

But I haven't looked into it particularly much, other than that, when people

But, "Print a booklet that's calendar sized, and I give you the images that

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The real challenge is getting your magazine known by the outside world, and find people who wants to read it. Most people my age would not read anything if you paid them.

Printing costs per issue diminish the more copies you produce. I am a bit out of touch as of late with the printing industry, but as a rule of thumb, digital printing is more flexible but more expensive, while mobile type presses are very cheap but only work for certain sorts of magazines and only for mass printing. I have picked deals for as low as 3 bucks the copy for black and white printing.

Where costs get rough is in the copyright and manpower department. I estimate an expense of 10 000 eur in copyright and author rights per issue for a professional grade magazine. The salaries of the staff who is in the payroll (asistant editors and such) is not taken into account. You need to produce around 2 500 copies to reduce the copyright and authorship costs bellow 4 bucks per issue, and you ned to figure out a way to sell as many.

TL;DR the first step to getting a magazine started is having deep pockets.



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The real challenge is getting your magazine known by the outside world, and find people who wants to read it. Most people my age would not read anything if you paid them.

I suppose. Realistically, I was going with, "I'd like to produce a hobby publication. As in, a hobby that I take up, where I print an issue a year or something, where I'll do most of the writing and everything myself.", and no, that is not the way to anything sustainable or a large print run.

Because, yeah, making it not-completely-a-hobby is a challenge. Because, as you say, getting x other people on board is likely the biggest challenge.

You need to produce around 2 500 copies to reduce the copyright and authorship costs bellow 4 bucks per issue, and you ned to figure out a
way to sell as many.

Yeah. Though I suppose this is a "faster, better, cheaper" thing, where you can generally pick up to two.

Finding really terrible writing that's barely on topic is doubtlessly going to be significantly cheaper than finding good writing that's on topic.

TL;DR the first step to getting a magazine started is having deep
pockets.

Indeed. Money is helpful for a lot of things.

Though, on that note, it's been fun, since I got a job as a software developer, to have enough money that it starts solving problems for me, rather than being the problem of why I can't do stuff.

Not that I make that much -- I'm in Germany, not Silicon Valley -- but, "hey, it'll cost me $1000 to try doing this thing" is not something that'd stop me.

But, yeah, getting a magazine started would still be out of my reach, even if I had the interest in spending that much time and energy on it.

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I suppose. Realistically, I was going with, "I'd like to produce a hobby publication. As in, a hobby that I take up, where I print an issue a
year or something, where I'll do most of the writing and everything myself.", and no, that is not the way to anything sustainable or a large print run.

I picked up a book binder from a local vocational tech school for less than $100. Of course it is not for magazines, but either way, auctions are definitely an addictively easy way to pick up some cool things you can do some very cool things that would normally be prohibitively expensive. I could talk about the biodiesel refiner and the 2x4 CNC wood router that I picked up as well. But that would definitely be of topic. lol

Killer

... Beta testers go where angels fear to tread

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I posted about a Kickstarter for a US-based retro-gaming magazine, previously, but lo and behold there's evidently a NZ-based retro-gaming magazine, with a few days left on a Kickstarter:

kickstarter.com/projects/afterburnett/nz-retro-magazine-issue-3

...and I know very little about it, other than just stumbling across it and being entertained by the video.

Do the NZ people here know anything about it?

Regardless, the Kickstarter made the goal, so presumably issue 3 of the magazine will make its way into existence.

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On Sat Oct 15 21:05:00 2022, Adept wrote to All <=-

I posted about a Kickstarter for a US-based retro-gaming magazine, previously, but lo and behold there's evidently a NZ-based retro-gaming magazine, with a few days left on a Kickstarter:

Regardless, the Kickstarter made the goal, so presumably issue 3 of the magazine will make its way into existence.

Sounds cool. One of my ideas as a teenager was to make my own zine or magazine. Maybe with software today, I could make a magazine with little or no problem since desktop publishing is for the masses now.

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