Newspaper Club

Hello! I’m Sarah Plant and I work on a little zine called Ferment. The chaps at Newspaper Club have asked me to talk a bit about how we solved some problems with selling our zine.

The idea behind Ferment is that for every issue we choose a theme that we hope will be as widely interpreted as possible, thus inspiring an extensive range of responses from our invited contributors. Initially writers respond to the theme, then illustrators respond to those writers’ poems or short stories. We then publish the paired-up results as a 12 page black and white newspaper. I design each issue, along with James Weiner, and our editor, Paul Askew.

Without Newspaper Club, Ferment probably wouldn’t exist. All of us were finding something lacking in our day jobs, wanted to do something creative together, that we had control over, and that was fun to do. We don’t intend to ever make any money from Ferment, but it does need to pay for itself. To do this, we sell it from our website, but we also sell it into shops around Oxford, where we are based.

Whilst online sales are reasonably healthy, the feedback we were getting from our stockists was that whilst customers were interested, it was hard to shift issues as Ferment could be mistaken for free music or illustrated magazines. This was obviously an issue that needed to be overcome. So how are we solving it?

We are attacking the problem in two ways for our next issue; a neat little bit of packaging design, and some simple changes to our masthead (the bit at the top of our front cover with our logo, pricing, etc).

Things like shrink-wrap and cellophane didn’t really tickle our fancy as people wouldn’t be able to get a feel for the paper, which is important to how Ferment is experienced, plus it can seem a bit tacky. Instead, we decided to roll up each issue and wrap it in a black belly band – perhaps evoking the quality of a morning paper thrown onto a lawn in an 80s John Hughes movie. The band is then ‘sealed’ with a small matt vinyl sticker that we got printed cheaply, featuring our logo and website address.

The other piece of the puzzle was to reinforce the value of Ferment, and to increase the desire for it. We came up with the idea of clearly individually numbering each copy of each issue, much like limited edition prints or records. The edition number will be positioned prominently next to our logo and price in the masthead, and can be seen even when the zine is rolled up.

So that’s it – feel free to rip off our ideas – although we probably won’t know how effective they’ve been until a few weeks after our next issue goes on sale in early February. The theme is ‘Cities’, and if you live in Oxford, you’ll be able to see the fruits of our (and our esteemed contributors’) labour in Comma, the Old Fire Station, and Blackwell’s book store or you can get it from fermentzine.com.

With this level of innovation print simply can’t be dead…

Thanks to @structomagazine who helpfully suggest we ship this, er, device with every order.

No sooner does Anne get made MD than she’s being name-checked in the FT. But then we know she’s a fast worker.

Newspaper Club was featured with our friends at Moo.com and Berg (and their intriguing Little Printer) in a piece about how Tech City Silicon Roundabout is knitting together paper and pixels. The message of the piece:

Many digital natives, it seems, are still remarkably attached to  legacy media.

We had a big Newspaper Club meeting and Christmas Dinner on Friday. Lots of exciting plans were discussed and Ben and I cried bitter tears at not getting Christmas bonuses, unlike everyone else, just because we never do any work whereas they do.

But the major event, for me, was that we announced Anne Ward’s elevation from Customer Service Supremo to Managing Director – in recognition of the fact that she is, basically, managing and directing the company.

There are lots of things to be proud of with Newspaper Club – printing our millionth paper, all the great papers people make, Tom’s coding genius – but the best bit for me has been to see Anne just take over and turn our silly idea into a brilliant business. Multiple times a week the @newspaperclub feed fills up with people saying great things about Anne and her team. It’s a joy to see. So, huge congratulations to Anne, and can we have Christmases bonuses next year please?

I experienced one of my biggest thrills whilst working at Newspaper Club (and there have been so very many) one evening earlier this year. We were celebrating the arrival of a shiny new digital press at one of our printing partners. Very thoughtfully, our printer friend had laid out on a big table all the papers they’d run off for Newspaper Club’s customers in the previous few weeks.

I knew we were constantly being given some great stuff to print but I was really unprepared for how good they all looked. Many were quite beautiful. Others clever and witty. Even the ones that had a bit of an amateur look about them looked amateur in a genuine and charming way. Brilliant.

Well, I’ve just experienced another thrill like that one. We now have an online, and constantly replenished, version of that printer’s big table on the site: our Newsagent. People share their newspapers there by simply selecting an option on the Dashboard when they’re ready. It’s only been up for a couple of weeks but there’s already a good selection.

To pick out a few from our currently featured papers (though I could have chosen literally dozens of interesting ones from those shared): this splendid wedding anniversary one by Phil Dobinson, which has surely earned him a wheelbarrow of marital brownie points and whose front page is at the top of this post (incidentally, they also made a similarly splendid wedding paper); this intriguing one by the Ferment ‘zine people, which happens to be about one of my favourite subjects, food (you can sign up to buy it here); this one by the photography collective wideyed featuring a residency in a French chateau and lots of wine-making (wine being another favourite thing); and this one made by Ingi, who is, you know, one of those Icelandic-Belgian-Geordie comic creators (it will be for sale at the Canny Comic Con on 10th December). I could go on – but why not pop over to the Newsagent and take a look yourself?

The word “newspaper” really doesn’t do it all justice, does it?

One of the world’s most prolific bloggers, US-based Andrew Sullivan, rediscovers the newspaper:

…I’ve switched from reading the NYT on my iPad to reading it on paper. It feels like a huge improvement. It isn’t that the iPad didn’t give me all the information I wanted – at any time. It’s just that when I have the actual paper in my hands, I find myself reading more – and more closely. I have a sense of accomplishment as I toss each ransacked section onto the floor next to my blogging chair. The photographs pop. The placement of the stories visually adds a layer of editorial spin that informs me about where the paper is coming from. I didn’t quite expect this. I liked my iPad mornings with coffee and gluten-free cookies. But suddenly, a newspaper is fresh.

We know exactly what he means. As do more and more people from far and wide – last week we delivered nearly half our papers overseas, mostly to Europe but also to customers in Australia and North America. We would like to send more to the US, and we’re sure we can.

So thanks for the reminder of what newsprint can do, Mr Sullivan.

Having spent a few weeks to-ing and fro-ing with the VAT people we’ve received some good news: most of our orders from now on won’t incur VAT. So on the weekend we put up some new VAT-free pricing.

If you’re handy with a calculator you may notice the headline price isn’t going down uniformly across all our newspapers – there have been some chunky increases in the price of newsprint recently and we’ve decided to move to a heavier weight of paper for a good proportion of our larger orders. We’ve also made the pricing more consistent. But for almost all of you who are not VAT-rated Newspaper Club is now a lot cheaper.

However, note the ‘almost’: we’ll still have to charge VAT on some newspapers. It’s quite a complicated area but the general rule of thumb is that if a newspaper contains a significant amount of written information it’s VAT-free; if it doesn’t – for instance, if it’s entirely full of photos – then we need to charge VAT at the standard 20% rate. In addition, for those papers that we write and/or design (a lot fewer now than formerly) we’ll need to charge VAT.

If you’re in doubt about the status of your newspaper please see what we say about VAT here or get in touch.

Mr Matthew Sheret, the hardest working man in data grioting, is equally dedicated to the business of making lovely comics. (Emphasising the word business.) He’s not just an artiste, he’s thinking about how to make this stuff economically viable.

You can see that in this post about Paper Science 4 – there’s a variety of business models and packages going on here, trying to make smallish scale publication work without everyone losing money. We’re delighted to be helping out with printing and distribution.

(Front cover by Luke Pearson)