Newspaper Club

Right, after lots of thinking, pondering, wondering, adjusting, spreadsheeting, negotiating and absolutely no consumer research we think we’ve got our price list sorted out.

These prices include VAT and delivery to any UK mainland address, except the Scottish Highlands. (To be honest I’m not quite sure what that bit about the Scottish Highlands means. Do we not deliver there at all? Or does it cost more? Neither seems very satisfactory. I’ll check.)

You get a 12-page tabloid size newspaper. Quantities from 5 to 300 are in black and white. Quantities from 500 up are colour. For ease of comparison we’ve also included what you’ll be paying per copy.

So here are the costs for black and white:

5 copies              £35       (£7 per copy)

20 copies           £70       (£3.50 per copy)

50 copies           £90       (£1.80 per copy)

100 copies         £120     (£1.20 per copy)

300 copies         £330    (£1.10 per copy)

And here are the costs for colour:

500 copies        £500     (£1 per copy)

1,000 copies     £900     (£0.90 per copy)

2,000 copies    £1,200   (£0.60 per copy)

5,000 copies    £1,500   (£0.30 per copy)

(More than that, get in touch and we’ll work something out)

As you can see, the more you do, the cheaper, per copy, it gets. These prices apply when you upload a pdf and we organise printing for you, or when you use ARTHR (our online layout tool that’ll help you design your paper.)

We think these prices make our services affordable for everyone who we might be interested. We hope so.

In other news, we’ve almost got all the legal stuff sorted out. We’re doing the last bit of alpha testing. We should be able to open the beta in the next few weeks.

UPDATE: International Shipping

Well, so far, prices seem to be OK with people but lots of you are asking about International Shipping. Erk. There’s no easy solution to this I’m afraid. Newspapers are heavy, physical things and shipping them around the world is going to cost money and carbon. Our eventual aim is to find enough printers around the globe that we won’t have to ship internationally, there’ll be a printer near you somewhere. In the medium-term we will be up for printing in the UK and shipping to you – but we can’t yet tell you how much it’ll be. Probably, on day one of the beta, it’ll be UK only. Sorry. We’ll get to the Rest Of The World as soon as possible. Huge thanks for your interest though.

A lot of glory in any start-up tends to go to the designers and engineers, they make the visible stuff, the stuff that gets written about, the stuff that wins awards. But the success of any start-up is really down to the people treading the streets, getting toes in door, getting in-your-face-time with wavering clients and Making A Sale – the Sales People. The newspaper we made with Folksy is a great example of this unsung art in operation. James has done us the favour of letting us peek inside the conversation:

The first rule of the patented Newspaper Club Always Be Selling Process (TM) – Positivity and Pith! There are two words here and they’re both positive. This is textbook.

I don’t believe this bit of the conversation actually happened, a Top-Class Sales Person (TM) wouldn’t use a word like hindsight because it fails two rules of Hard Sales Language – No Soft Vowels and No Long Words. Anyway.

And here’s The Close. Observe the Textbook use of monosyllabic words and strict adherence to ABCIFTK principles (Always Be Coming In For The Kill).

This is how a start-up gets started-up. Sales. Hard-nosed, hard-faced, leave-nothing-on-the-table, get-your-tanks-on-their-lawn salespersonship. Let’s not forget that.

Seriously though. Big thanks to all the folksy folk. This is a lovely project, we’re very glad to help. More pictures will follow shortly.

We’ve not posted much recently have we? It’s because we’ve been biting our nails and watching the internets.* In the middle of last week we sent beta invites to about twenty of our friends giving them access to Newspaper Club and our proprietary ARTHR system.

We’re fortunate enough to know people who know loads about UI, websites etc – they’ve been giving us splendid feedback. We’re also fortunate to know people who know bugger all about that sort of stuff – they’ve been giving us equally valuable feedback. Next week we’re going to incorporate their thoughts, then, with just a few legal and PayPal hurdles to clear we should be able to share it with more of you.

In the meantime we’re still angling for some decent chairs if anyone’s got any going spare. The picture above should indicate the direness of our need.

*Not really. Ben’s gone to the US for holidays, Tom’s cycling round town looking for good kiting spots, Russell’s trying to convince MPs we’re a good thing.

You’ll be pleased to know that after our Investor Crisis midweek our shiny new Skype headsets arrived yesterday. They’re very nice and they came in a clever little postbox friendly cardboard box.

This morning I thought I’d try Skyping the rest of the team.

I tried Engineering first. No answer. I don’t think they were awake yet.

I tried Sales & Marketing next. No answer. I think they’d gone out for breakfast. They often do that.

Anyway, the headsets are splendid and this has got us wondering if anyone else would like to donate to a teeny start up. We’re particularly after some Aeron chairs right now.

In other news, we’re printed some more newspapers which I’ll blog about later and we’re fine tuning the design of key pages. We’re also getting ready for a very quiet, very private, very Beta launch next week. We’re going to test the site on a handful of people and if that goes well we’ll release the Beta to rest of the 2,000 people currently on our signup list.

(I’m not sure if “release the Beta” is recognised terminology. I was going to ask Engineering but they weren’t awake.)

We like 4ip. We like that they mock us and we mock them. We don’t think this is the normal investor/start-up relationship. For instance, we had this conversation yesterday (start from the top and read down). Apologies to anyone who thought we were really having a relationship crisis. Though I notice no-one came forward with offers of alternative funding. (Maybe because we take the piss out of our investors.)

Oh, and big thanks to Skype for the headsets. Very kind.

In other news, we’re very close to beta.

Remaining issues – paypal have to send us a letter with a secret code in it. We need to determine our VAT status before we can tell you our prices. We need Ts & Cs and Terms of Trade, so we need to have more meetings with lawyers.

Nearing beta now. Engineering frustrated with PayPal. PayPal convinced we’re fraudsters. Sales & Marketing writing copy. Art redesigning pages. Many enquiries coming in. Phone calls. VAT returns. Emails. More forms. Raised voices. Icons. Meetings. Specs. Meetings. Plans.

Soon, very soon.

We’ve been waiting for more pictures before writing about this. But I don’t want to let another day slip by, so I’m going to mention it now and we can add more pictures when they arrive.

One of the things we hoped for when we started this foolish quest would be that people would think of things to do with Newspaper Club that we couldn’t have imagined ourselves. 2Halves is a perfect example. It’s a special one-off newspaper, written by Spurs and Arsenal bloggers, 3,500 copies were printed yesterday morning in anticipation of the latest North London Derby and handed out to fans before the game. It’s a lovely looking thing, produced by our friends at The Rebel Alliance, and, if you missed it, you can download a pdf at their website. (Or, if you’re quick request a printed copy.)

As I say, more pictures when we get them. But, in the meantime, congrats to The Rebel Alliance for a splendid idea – which will hopefully inspire others to do something similar.

We had a Status Meeting this morning.

Everything is going well. All on target. Engineering ensure us a beta launch is “geologically imminent”.

We also had to fill in an Investor Status Report which made us realise we’re only £500 away from reaching 50% of our revenue target. That’s got to be good, especially pre-launch. Pre-lunch in fact, as Engineering have just popped out for a sandwich.

Matt is also doing a splendid job on the Guide To Newspaper Club he’s putting together. Today he presented us a glorious flat plan. On a flip chart.

Made a nice change from all the PowerPoint Sales and Marketing put us through.

(A quick introduction: In the run up to launch Matthew will be in Newspaper Towers playing with the interaction and language of our guide. When he’s finished it should answer all of the questions you have before you put together your own publication – and if it doesn’t then that’s his fault. He’ll also be doing a few behind the scenes blog entries, kind of like our own embedded reporter. So, without further ado, over to Matthew…)

It’s worth restating that for all of the brilliant and compelling reasons there are for making a newspaper, they don’t amount to much without content. Well-designed layouts are quite forgiving of white space, but 12 blank pages is a threat for people familiar with printing, let alone newcomers: yesterday’s staus meeting made it clear that even large organisations are having trouble ‘getting those final two pages in place’.

(Of course, in time this may be another thing the Bespoke Service will be able to help with: “Throw enough money at us and we’ll print on gold.”)

Something I need to emphasise in the guide is the fact that preparation of content is essential. Really. Part of the fun of the system is being able to play with how your copy looks on the page. If you think you’ll want to print a newspaper around the launch then go away now and start gathering words and pictures. I mean it: Now. It’s better to have to leave things out than abandon a half full draft.

In other news, the success of the Postcode Paper prompted Sales and Marketing to secure motivational literature for the team:

You may have noticed we’ve slightly changed the Newspaper Club logo. The previous one used a temporary paperboy graphic whilst we worked behind the scenes to create a bespoke one.

I’d like to tell you about the thinking behind the logo and show you some of the versions that didn’t make the cut. Other start ups don’t give you that level of transparency, do they?

When you think of newspapers you probably think of that ‘funny marmalade’ font. And you’d be right. That font you’re thinking of visually equals newspaper, so I elected to use that. Simple. I’m a huge fan of not over complicating design, as my old boss used to say, “you might say cliché, I might say crystal clear communication”.

Most of the typography that would pass as crystal clear communication for a newspaper masthead is based on the font Blackletter. Blackletter has it’s uses, but on screen is not one of them. In fact, it’s more Duchy Originals than Daily Oregonian as over an incredible 1,000 years Blackletter has undergone many cuts and derivatives and most broadsheet newspapers today use stylised versions. Or typefaces based on a gothic Blackletteresque font, more accurately.

I needed a version that said ‘newspaper’ as instantly as Blackletter but worked well on screen.

Back in June (on day one in fact) I looked at several versions and settled on Brauhaus . It has been simplified and is therefore better for online use yet it still retains the newspaper feel I was after. To make the letters more distinctive I opted to change the N and the C for slightly tweaked versions of the Blackletter N and C.

That’s the word marque sorted but for a modern start up you need an icon for all those pesky 32×32 square icons you have to create. And that’s where the paperboy came in.

The original inspiration was the Paperboy Atari game from the 1984. That’s a sort of digital newspaper joke for people of a certain age.

A little character would be handy for all those icons and also for guiding you through the newspaper making process. It feels right for Newspaper Club as we’re a friendly tool for people and communities not a secretive, hard edged, spiky tech dot com.

We used this chap for a while, but it was just a place holder. We wanted our own, so we tasked the amazing Rexbox with creating one for us. Rex has worked on all sorts of cool stuff including co-creating LittleBigPlanet and stuff for Disney and MTV.

Here he is. The paperboy, not Rex.

The result is a modern, friendly logo whilst hinting at the visual history of the newspaper masthead.  We hope you like it.