Your Target Readership

You should provide information on whom you expect to buy or read your magazine. You should also give details of any research you have carried out into potential readership/response to the kind of magazine you have in mind, including total market size and your estimated percentage share of the market.

Marketing

You should include information on how you will handle marketing and sales of your publication.

Financial Information

This should include details of estimated income (e.g. revenue from advertising, subscriptions, sponsorship and reproduction rights) and expenditure (e.g. printing, postage, design, staff costs/fees) and any assets (both tangible, such as equipment, and ‘intangible’, such as intellectual property or trademarks). You should also include cash flow forecasts (when money is likely to come in and go out).

It is also important to consider how the magazine will be funded until it is solvent, and whether any outside investment will be needed (including possible grants or lottery funding). A timescale for solvency is important – how long you expect it will be before the magazine breaks even or makes a profit. If the magazine is being produced for a not-for-profit organisation, it will be important to know the extent to which the organisation may need to support it financially.

Identification Of Any Risk Factors

You should consider any factors that could work against your magazine; for example:

• emergence of major competition
• growing too quickly for the resources available
• possible loss of funding
• competing time demands on the editorial/production team

Details Of Activities And Controls

This should include information on the processes you will use to achieve results, and details of your accounting and other control systems. You don’t need to go into too much detail here, but it is important to give a broad outline of the activities, systems and processes you intend to put in place. It is also worth estimating the time that setting up and running the magazine will take – remembering that it is likely to be more than you anticipate at first.

Future Development

You should also consider how the magazine might develop in the future, and any new activities that might be associated with it; for example:

• production of other publications on associated topics
• expansion into different geographical regions
• merchandising associated with the subject area
• selling out to a larger publisher

Action Planning

Finally, you should include details of major actions to be taken, the timescale for their achievement and any procedures you will establish to monitor and review your success and update your goals and activities.

This might sound like a lot of work and, if you are involved in the production of a very simple magazine, you might feel it is unnecessarily complex. However, the discipline of doing this thinking, even if you do not commit it all to paper in a formal way, will be of benefit and may well highlight issues and activities which might otherwise be overlooked.