It was requested and commented on many times when we published our magazine, for it to be printed in paper form. 

We have also been asked for a downloadable copy, for which we did not offer.

So we thought we would do a short blog for you to explain why it was not available as a printed edition and why it was view only.

It would be a wonderful day, when we could offer our magazine as a printed edition.  The reason we were unable to offer it is purely down to cost.

The printed magazines you see on the shop shelves or on subscriptions, as big or small as they are, are printed in the 1000's, which are then distributed to various retail outlets and subscription sites. 

With printing, the more you print, the lower the cost, so big publishers or magazines will print 1000's of them for UK and worldwide distribution. (These companies also have huge marketing budgets). This then enables them to offer the magazine at a decent retail price, that customers are willing to purchase at. 

Smaller companies like ours, do not have the privilege of enabling such a wonderful function, although with your help one day this may be possible.

Our magazine was a newbie product, it had a nice little following, that was growing all the time... They do take quite a while to design and implement, and did take up a lot of time, putting other projects on the back burner.  Even though the following for the magazine was growing, it was still relatively small, so we took the decision to put it on hold to complete our other projects.  We are hoping to reintroduce it again someday soon.

When we do reintroduce the magazine, to get it printed for retail, we will need to take into consideration the following:

Printing costs
Packaging costs
Postage costs
Distribution costs
Time costs

That is all before adding on any minimal profit for us.

As it would be a monthly magazine, it is time limited, so you will mainly only get customers purchasing probably at the beginning of the month, with some throughout.

We only published 3 editions of the magazine, so how would you work out how many to get printed without wastage? It would be a little suck and see and order xxxx amount of copies.

All seems plausible till you work out the costs.

With the amount each month we would order, based on previous sales, it would make our magazine very expensive to purchase, we can roughly work out that each magazine would cost at least £20+ to sell, as we do not have the numbers.  Would you pay that for a monthly mag? We suspect not!

So what would be the work around...

Until it is possible to offer this service, the magazine would be available to you digitally.  It is the only way to get it out to you at an affordable price for everyone.

With our new website, we will perfect how you can access your magazine through your portal, so you would not need to log into links anymore.

We were trying very hard to get the magazine on Kindle, but Amazon, who owns Kindle, had us on a waiting list.  We are still waiting!

Let's go back to the other question, as to why you could not download it!

The magazine was viewed online only, this was to protect our brand and the magazine.

Unfortunately, there are many fraudsters out there that steal people's work and claim it as their own, or copy cats, irrelevant of copyrights.

In order to help prevent this from happening, the magazine would not available for download or allowed to be copied.

We do hope you understand our reasoning and if you have any questions in it's regard, please do email in.