Finally, a true publishing solution for small communities!

Are you a publisher or graphic designer of a small community print publication? If so, you probably face a whole variety of challenges aside from folks asking “What? You still do print?!”. The question of when print media is most effective is a topic for another time. But let’s look at some of the problems you probably face in publishing print. High cost of quality print, dwindling advertisers, content aggregation – might sound familiar. Let’s tackle these one by one. 

Premium Print is expensive or so you think? 

If you have been printing for a while, you can be forgiven for thinking in terms of number of pages of color. We can thankfully say goodbye to those days. With aPrintis, you can print a visually appealing, full color, 32 pager in 70# glossy stock for ~$1 per copy. If you order 1000 copies or more. We all knew the qualifier was coming :). Try doing some online sleuthing for comparative prices for similar small size premium print orders. You will likely find that, with aPrintis, you save more than 50% on print costs. Print fulfillment is done by a Fortune 500 printer with world class facilities all over the country. Therefore, you can count on consistency in print quality and delivery, issue after issue. Check out available pricing for other options here. And, if you were wondering what 70# glossy paper stock feels like, request a sample here.

We find, over and over, that our ability to price affordably is the singular reason that a small community is able to do a print publication at all. Communities such as clubs, churches, non-profits, high schools, colleges, hobby groups (Facebook groups) and even senior centers. And yes, I said high schools. If public high schools with scarce resources can publish impressive magazines, any community can!

The basic options are self cover (cover paper stock same as inside pages), standard 8.5×11 in. page size and page counts in multiples of 16. Options such as other trim sizes, page counts, uv coating, harder covers etc. are available, however, the most popular specs tend to be the best priced.

Affordable pricing is only one piece of the puzzle affecting the financial stability of the community publication. Effective fund raising is the other. 

Financing the publication – now at your finger tips! 

Most community magazine publications still depend on advertising from local businesses to pay for the printing cost. With every passing day, this is becoming more and more of an uphill battle. Print advertising is not what one would call performance-based. It is generally not amenable to delivering intricate readership analytics related to demographics, location, behavior etc. So we have to look for other solutions.

If we ask the question: Who cares the most about your publication? The simple answer is your own community! The consumer of your content. They are most likely to support your publication.

As a publisher, you probably know your community well enough to not have to guess what content would be of high interest to them. If the content is relevant, the product visually appealing and well promoted to your community, folks will subscribe to your publication. Many may go over and beyond and sign up for sponsorships. Especially, if others in the community do so. With the aPrintis platform, you can easily set up different sponsorship levels, custom donations, subscription levels and advertising rate sheets. And then, send invites to the entire community or share through social media for them to visit and engage – for no additional cost! Learn more about fund raising for your publication with aPrintis here

One last thought on fund raising. If you give your community the option to also contribute content to the magazine, wouldn’t their interest in the magazine rise sharply.  And, wouldn’t that drive up sponsorships and subscriptions for the publication as well?!

That leads us to the Content …

Need more writers? Everyone in your community is a potential author – you just have to ask!

Even in a small connected community, we don’t all like the same things to the same degree. A good place to start to discover common denominator content threads in your community is to let everyone send in their own stories, articles, photos etc. Through aPrintis’s platform, your community can send in content for consideration to be featured in the publication. Your editorial staff and graphic designers, trained on creating great product with Adobe InDesign, can then turn that content into what will become the branding publication of your community. Of course, you could limit the invitations to a smaller subset of the community to prevent being inundated with content contributions. One thing is for certain – seeing one’s own or friends’ articles/pictures in a professionally produced community publication is pretty gratifying and at the very least, of great interest. 

Enabling your community to contribute to your community magazine changes the game as far as their implicit engagement. The community will support it, sponsor it, nurture it, contribute to it, protect it, and promote it. Because, the publication will be personal for them. It indeed becomes a publication by the community, for the community. 

Promoting the publication to your community

An area where community publishers sometimes fall short is building up anticipation for the forthcoming issue. With the aPrintis platform, your editorial staff can send your community a sneak preview of the magazine/newsletter. This gets everyone excited about it early enough to sign up for subscriptions, sponsorships and for businesses to advertise in it. You can set up email invites to your community or share a link to the publication on aPrintis through social media.

While most of what we talked about above may have seemed relevant only for the publisher, if you are the graphic designer of the publication you should care even more. 

Why should graphics pros should care? Don’t leave money on the table

As a graphic designer, you probably design/create publications for multiple clients such as clubs, non-profit orgs, businesses, churches, city orgs, schools/colleges etc. You can help save your clients hundreds of dollars on printing cost per issue. In addition, you can make non-trivial recurring income on every print that your client orders. The much bigger deal, of course, is that you will help your client stabilize their publication financially. And, make their publication much more community-immersive and get access to reliable, premium print from a Fortune 500 printer. Find out how much you could earn from referring your client to aPrintis on an on-going basis here

You will also find it convenient that you can access the aPrintis platform from within Adobe Creative Cloud as an Adobe extension. Learn more and download the aPrintis Adobe Extension here

In summary, what you write about, you and your community obviously know the best. But by making community collaboration, fund raising and promotion easier as well as by bringing you the best prices possible for premium print, we hope that we are able to help make your publication even more successful. Making your publication more community-immersive is worthwhile and easy to do. Just ask aPrintis customers all around the country – high schools, churches, non-profit publishers etc. who work on very tight budgets and have a track record of creating long-lived magazine programs.