Welcome to the first edition of our Pokéjungle.net Magazine Newsroom. In this recurring series I will debrief everyone on the latest news and tidbits from the scenes of PJNM. Let’s start with the main point of today.
Survey
You may recall we did a survey two weeks ago. This survey was intended to gauge people’s expectation regarding pricing of the magazine. I will not represent the data graphically, as I just wanted a general outlook. The first thing that came to mind was that everyone’s price expectations for the number of pages was way too low. This posed us with a dilemma, lots of people wanted 50+ pages, but they still expect the magazine to be under $5. The reason why actual magazines are be able to do this is because they feature lots of ads, and print thousands of copies in advance. We don’t have those. However, I found a good compromise.
Pages
The number of pages is set to be between 40 and 45. This gives us room to do lots of different articles, with not having to resort to filler. It also won’t make the printed edition too expensive if you include shipping.
Printed Magazine Price
First, the bad news. A page count of 40 would mean the magazine is in the $8-9 price range. Sadly, we don’t have much say in this. Print on demand is still relatively expensive. However, I still believe we go through with those for following reasons. First, the printed magazine is intended for the real fans, and with only two (or three) copies a year, this won’t become an expensive endeavour. Second, we won’t take a mark-up on the magazine, to keep the price low and to show we’re not into profit-making. And last, we will make up for this in a number of ways. We will put our heart and soul into the magazine to make sure it is worth owning. This means unique content that will be hard to find on other Pokémon fansites. And…
Digital Magazine
All digital copies will be available free of charge. This is so you can experience the magazine yourself before deciding to buy it. It will also come with a license that allows you to print it for personal use or for relatives, providing you don’t make a profit off it. We first wanted to sell it for $1, because there are a few costs associated even with the digital edition. We’re still looking for a good place to distribute it free of charge, seeing as the magazine will be quite large in download size and we want you to have decent download speeds. We’ll also need money for stamps and letters to get written permission for articles, art,… We found a kind sponsor for all this however. He’s not tied to any company and we won’t put any real ads in the mag, but there might be a page or two written by him :).
And now some announcements regarding the content itself.
Readers’ Tree
Readers’ Tree is the name for our community section. A section named Through the Grapevines will feature the best comments from the past few months, carefully selected by the PJNM staff. Alderman’s Tree Stump will be our spotlighted commenter of the issue, featuring an extensive interview. And as a final announcement, we will hold a contest in where you can have your own opinion article featured in the game. The winner will receive a printed copy as compensation. More details on the contest in the following weeks.
Next time we’ll give a sneak peek at the PJNM logo, made by our own in-house artist moving. Until then!
~Daedardus~ Editor-in-Chief on behalf of the PJNM Staff.