Hi Tim,
Cool idea, and one John Wallace and I considered a couple years back with SRN.
We were fortunate enough to have Steve Smith (GPL guide, et al) in the CSI
Sportsim forum where we hung out, and I asked if a newsie (on paper or mag)
would be possible. Below is the original note, where the first section deals
with the "glossy" newstand type, and goes on to the news letter style you're
considering.
=======================
(06/19/96)
Hi Marc,
If you're talking about a traditional "class-mass" magazine (glossy paper,
run-of-book-4-color, letterpress-printed, saddle-stitched,
nationally-distributed, advertising-supported, ABC-audited, monthly), my advice
is forget it. I've spent a third of a century in the special-interest magazine
field (Car and Driver, Road & Track, AutoWeek, Motor Trend, PC Computing,
blah-blah) and the niche you guys occupy is too narrow. Of course, the same
could be said of PC *** magazines five years ago, and now there are a dozen.
The trick is timing. It's entirely possible that five years hence your idea
would be feasible, but being there too early is_much_worse than being there too
late. Let the other pioneers take arrows in the back. Four out of five mags
fail in their first year, usually from being underfinanced (many would be
successful if they had the wherewithall to continue--the payback is anywhere
from two years out to never). Of the remainder, three out of four fail in their
second year.
The key is advertising. There aren't enough advertisers to pay the freight.
Most wait until you're successful. Few will talk to you until your circulation
reaches critical mass, which for a "vertical" mag like SRN would be about
50,000. Aside from startup costs, circ costs about a dollar per subscriber per
issue. Thus, 50K would cost you $600,000 a year over and above editorial,
printing and distribution.
Like DOS, there are work-arounds. If you can get printing for free, you can get
pretty far down the road. This usually means finding a printing shop where the
owner will take a 51% share (or more) of your business in exchange for printing
the mag. I believe this is the case for both RACER and that nicely printed
vintage-car mag. You still have to pay editorial, marketing, postage, etc. You
can sometimes also get a distributor to handle you for "free" (in exchange for
equity or debt), but your chances for decent newsstand distrib are slim to
none. This means you have to do it direct by "renting" mailing lists from
people like Spec Holo or Papy who have customer lists of sim buyers. Here, a
get them to subscribe, billing costs, etc.
My advice: 1. Consider a snail-mail newsletter, like Brock Yates' old Cannonball
ExPress. Here you can break even on 5,000 subs. (OTOH, Yates closed it down
because, after 5 years, it_still_wasn't worth the effort...even though it was
much loved.) 2. Consider a fax-back newsletter. Your printing costs are
reduced to zero, and your distribution costs are cut to a fraction (U.S. postage
is cash-on-the-barrell, and 5,000 first-class stamps a month is almost twenty
thousand bucks a year...and you need first-class if you expect your rag to have
any news-value...important in the kan-ban world of sims).
Finally, why fall back on 17th century technology at all? Why not try to get
advertisers to support your Web page? It's not anybody's favorite business
model, but a few pages are getting it to work. Micro payments are a nice idea,
but I don't see anybody making_that_work. A cross between the two: an e-mail
service. Instead of waiting for someone to visit you, you aggressively lobby
them for a sub, and when they agree to a 90-day free trial, you e-mail a HTML
docu to them. After 90 days, they pay, say, 50 cents an issue or you cut them
off.
<non-essential stuff snipped>
Best,
--Steve
> I have been considering doing a monthly (maybe every two weeks) news letter
Cheers!
Marc - Sim Racing News
(replace confused with concentric in e-mail addy to reply)
--
Marc J. Nelson
SimRacing Online - http://www.racesimcentral.net/
