Publishing your own magazine in the UK: ISSN, law and printing

Viz started in December 1979 as a twelve-page fanzine, photocopied in Newcastle by Chris Donald with help from his brother Simon and a friend, Jim Brownlow. The first run was 150 copies, priced at 20p, and it sold out at the Gosforth Hotel within hours. By the early 1990s it was circulating around 1.2 million copies. Nobody could have planned that, and none of the advice here would have predicted it. But most of the useful parts of a magazine business were in place on the first night: a product, a price, a place to sell it and someone willing to buy it.

Private Eye and The Face: two ways to start small

Private Eye is the cleanest example of a cheap start. It began in 1961 because photo-litho offset printing meant anybody with a typewriter and Letraset could produce a magazine, and it was edited by Christopher Booker, designed by Willie Rushton and financed first by Andrew Osmond. Peter Cook bought the company in November 1961. The pages looked homemade because they were.

The Face went the other way. Nick Logan launched it on 1 May 1980 as a professionally printed monthly, with Jerry Dammers of The Specials on the first cover, photographed by Chalkie Davies. Neither route is better. Your first decision is which of those two you can afford, and the answer shapes the paper, the page count and how often you can appear.

Make the title registrable: ISSN and barcode

A periodical that is meant to continue needs an ISSN, an eight-digit identifier shared across the world. The Wikipedia entry on the ISSN describes the format, and in the UK the code comes from the British Library’s ISSN UK Centre, which allocates it without charge, usually within about two weeks.

The ISSN also feeds the barcode. Retail periodicals use a 13-digit barcode that starts with 977, followed by seven digits of the ISSN, with an add-on for the issue. If you are selling by mail or through your own site, you can skip the barcode. If a shop will stock you, ask what it needs before you design the cover, since the barcode takes a fixed place. The page on how a cover is built shows where it sits.

The law you cannot skip

Four rules affect nearly everyone. All are short, and none needs a lawyer to understand.

First, legal deposit. The Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 means a copy of anything published in print in the UK must go to the British Library within one month of publication, and the other legal deposit libraries may claim theirs within a year. The Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries answers common questions, and the Act itself is on legislation.gov.uk.

Second, the printer’s imprint. The Printer’s Imprint Act 1961 preserves the old rule from the nineteenth century: printed matter that carries a message or pictures needs the printer’s name and address on it. Printers usually add the line on the last page. Some people think the rule obsolete, but the Act is still in the statute book.

Third, defamation. The Defamation Act 2013 begins with a requirement that a statement must have caused, or be likely to cause, serious harm to someone’s reputation before it can be sued on. That helps against trivial claims. It does not protect you from publishing something false and damaging about a named person. The issue to worry about is not the opinion piece but the factual claim in a caption.

Fourth, copyright. The government’s guide to copyright explains that it arises automatically when a work is created. That covers the photograph you found online, the logo you borrowed and the poem you reprinted. Get permission in writing, and keep it.

Decide the shape before you write a word

Frequency comes first. A weekly or monthly needs a team and a steady supply of material; a quarterly can be made by two people with other jobs. For most first-time publishers a quarterly is the right answer, because it leaves time to make each issue good and gives readers time to want the next one. Page count follows from the money, and a thin issue with a clear idea beats a thick one with none.

Then comes the reader. Not “people who like music” but a person you could name, in a town you can find, who would otherwise read something else. A title made for a reader you can picture sounds like somebody, and one made for everyone sounds like nobody.

Pay contributors something, even if it is little, and put the terms in writing: what rights you are buying, whether the writer can reuse the piece, and when payment arrives. Unpaid writers drift away after the second issue. Photographers are the ones most likely to be annoyed if you assume permission.

Selling it

A subscription is worth more than a shop sale, because the money arrives before the printing bill and the reader is known to you. Offer one from the first issue, with a plain page that states the price, the number of issues and the start date. Keep the price list off the cover until you are sure it will hold.

Online, a website costs little and builds an audience, but it is not a substitute for the printed issue if the printed issue is what you are selling. Treat the site as the shop window.

Printing, paper and the cover

Ask for quotes from at least three printers, for the same specification, at two run lengths. Costs vary a good deal, and the cheapest quote often depends on paper you would not choose. Ask to see a printed sample of a magazine the printer has already made, and hold it. The page that tells you most is the cover, because it takes a heavier stock and the lamination changes how the ink looks.

Spend more on the cover than on any other single page. It is the only thing a buyer sees before the decision. Famous magazine covers are mostly a lesson in doing one thing clearly, and a first-time publisher can learn from that for free.

Before the files go to the printer

Proofread on paper. Errors that vanish on a screen show up in a printed proof, and the cover is the page where a typo hurts most. Check the page order, the page numbers and the issue date against the ISSN and barcode, and ask the printer for a hard proof of the cover if the budget allows, since colour on a monitor is not colour on stock.

Allow a week between final files and delivery, and a margin on top for a printer who is busier than promised. Then work out who will pack and post the subscriber copies, because that falls on the publisher and it takes longer than anyone expects. A spare weekend and a pile of envelopes is the usual answer for a first issue.

Distribution: the part nobody mentions at the start

Most of the newsagent trade in the UK goes through wholesalers. Smiths News is the largest, and its business is to take titles from publishers, deliver them overnight to retailers and collect what is unsold. That last part matters: shop sales are on a sale-or-return basis, so the publisher bears the risk of the unsold copies. A wholesaler tends to want a track record before taking on a title, and a one-person magazine with a single issue rarely has one.

So most small titles do something else. They sell direct through a website, stock a handful of specialist shops, go to fairs and take subscriptions. A title that needs a distributor generally needs one only after it has proved itself.

Niche titles that last

The specialist magazine is a survivor. Some have run for a century on a loyal readership. One example is health and efficiency magazine, which claims to have started in 1900, although the first issue under that name appeared in 1918 when it replaced a title called Health and Vim. It began as a title on diet and exercise, and became the country’s best-known naturist magazine; the history is on its Wikipedia entry.

At the other end of the shelf are licensed magazines for children, made under an agreement with the owner of a character. The UK my little pony magazine began in September 1985 and ran to 224 issues, according to a fan-compiled catalogue. Such a title belongs to the licence holder as much as the publisher, which makes it a poor model for someone starting from nothing.

The point of both is the same. A magazine is easier to sustain when a particular reader would otherwise have nothing to buy.

What it costs, and what it does not

Printing is the largest bill, but it is rarely the one that kills a title. Time does. Every issue needs writers, pictures, proofing and posting before it earns a penny, and if the first two do not cover their costs the third is hard to start. Costs depend on page count, paper and run, so ask printers for numbers instead of trusting anyone’s rule of thumb, including this page.

Learn from print titles outside your field. A look at the page on science journals shows how a periodical with no pictures survives on authority, and the guides to magazines cover the commercial titles. You will see how different the models are.

The first issue is also the first thing a stranger judges you on. If the printer’s imprint is missing, find out before the van arrives.