Publishing Community Or Local Magazines - A Flexible Home-Based Business
Small businesses publishing free magazines have blossomed in towns, villages and residential estates across the UK. They are part of a fine tradition. In 1859, the Reverend J Erskine Clarke, Vicar of St Michael's, Derby, published the first edition of The Parish Magazine, aimed not at the 'committed in the parish but at the other half'! One hundred and fifty years later, parish magazines are still lovingly produced and distributed by most of the Church's 13,000 parishes the length and breadth of the land and their readership is conservatively estimated to surpass one million.* Today, desktop publishing has made the production of more commercially orientated local publications possible from home. They are often run by career-oriented mothers who want to work from home and care for their children, active retirees pursuing a new interest or by those who prefer to work for themselves and escape commuting to an office. You don't need to be Dickens or to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature to publish a simple magazine. Much of the content for each issue can be supplied by readers or other sources. As long as you are capable of processing written information, using your computer, organising a work schedule and communicating, you can make a go of it. Very little equipment is required to set up as a publisher. Many people already have most of the necessary at their finger tips - computer, colour printer, scanner and landline with answer machine. Page-layout software is essential but no there's no need to spend a fortune on high-end programmes, such as QuarkXpress or Adobe Indesign. You can manage to produce straightforward publications with MS Publisher. Specialised graphics software is also required to manipulate images for use in your magazine. Again, you don't need to fork out for top-of-the-range products, such as Adobe Photoshop, so long as you have a programme for resizing, retouching and converting images to tiff format. The Gimp is open-source image-editing software, freely available on the internet, and there are others, such as Paint.NET. Unless you are a graphic designer, you wouldn't expect your home-published magazine to be designed to the standard of a national glossy. That won't matter, as long as the publication is well produced, informative, relevant to the lives and aspirations of its readers and reliably distributed. It then has every likelihood of being accepted, even highly regarded, by its readership. Many community and parenting magazines have proved to be remarkably successful. Running a local magazine is not likely to make you super rich - unless you possess the entrepreneurial skills of Rupert Murdoch - but you can develop your business beyond a single magazine in a single location and increase your income. There is plenty of scope to do this, as well as to put your magazines online. However, most people who launch a local magazine are happy to make an income at home that fits round family activities or hobbies. How much they make is dependent on a number of factors, including effort, frequency of publishing, area of distribution and the business skills of the operator. Is there a future for a small local print magazines in the face of digital competition? It seems so. Consumer magazines have been holding their own very well against the digital tide. Humans still like reading magazines. If your publication is within arm's reach - all colourful and tempting, yielding information that is of interest by virtue of its locality, subject matter or visual impact, people will pick it up and flip through it. If it doesn't warrant keeping, they put it down or into the recycling bin. If, on the other, hand, it contains some nuggets of useful or entertaining information they will hold on to it and read it more thoroughly. If they can glean information from a handy publication why would they want to hunt through a host of websites to find it? Home publishing makes a versatile, creative and 'family-friendly' business to run from home. It's economical to set up, offers the flexibility to operate around other commitments in your life. Whether you are looking for a home business or wishing to increase your skills base or develop a hobby, publishing is exciting, demanding and will give you a tremendous feeling of achievement.Margaret Hotson http://www.simplyhomepublishing.com (c) Copyright - Margaret Hotson * the information on the history of parish magazines comes from the Church of England website http://www.cofe.anglican.org/about/diocesesparishes/parishmags/history.html Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?Publishing-Community-Or-Local-Magazines---A-Flexibl...] Publishing Community Or Local Magazines - A Flexible Home-Based BusinessComments [0]
