This chapter pulls together the various tasks involved in magazine production and gives you some suggestions for systems and procedures which will help you manage your activities. The chapter is split into two parts – project management processes and project management tools.
Project Management Processes
The following topics, which have already been covered in the book, are the major areas of project management activity on magazines:
- managing finances (Chapter 9)
- publicising your magazine (Chapter 15)
- managing contributions (Chapter 10)
- managing advertisements (Chapter 10)
- handling production activities (Chapter 11)
- communicating with people (Chapter 11)
Let’s take each of these in turn and consider the processes you can establish to manage them.
Managing Finances
This is a complex area and you will need to decide whether to keep manual or electronic records, or both. It is worth discussing financial management with someone qualified in accountancy or bookkeeping if you do not have expertise yourself in this area.
Publicising Your Magazine
It is worth keeping files on publicity activities. An example of files you could keep on this topic are:
- general publicity campaigns
- sources of publicity
- publicity to be conducted for the current issue
- past publicity
- ideas for future publicity
Managing Contributions
It is important to have a good system for recording and dealing with contributions, otherwise your content will be in disarray.
The simplest method to adopt is to have a single folder for each issue of the magazine; it is useful to have this both in a manual system (e.g. a filing cabinet) and electronically (as a computer file). It really is worth having manual files as well as computer ones because, if your computer is out of action, or you get a virus which destroys your files, you still have a hard-copy back up, and also some items may be easier to hold manually – for example, if you are sent a large report from which to extract items for publication.
Within each manual file, it is useful to have a clear plastic folder containing everything relating to a particular contribution. To start with, each folder might just have a piece of paper with a note of an idea for a contribution; it could then progress to having details of possible contributors, notes of conversations and progress made, draft contributions and final versions of the item. You can also indicate which items need sending to contributors as proofs before printing.
If you label each folder, or tag it in some way, it will be easier to see at a glance what each one contains. (There are now bright labels available, which can be stuck to papers and peeled off when necessary, that really help with this – they are also useful for proof-reading and marking up copy. The labels are a development of PostIt® Notes and the best ones to get are about two inches long and half an inch wide, in a range of bright colours.)
Remember to discard earlier drafts as they are superseded by later ones, otherwise you could find your files bulging with irrelevant papers. And if you decide a particular contribution will not be going into a particular issue, you can move it elsewhere, for example into the file for your next issue, or into a pending file.
Once the issue has been published, you can discard most of the contents of the manual files, making sure you do keep any items which you think you could need again in the future.
As well as the single issue files, it is useful to have a general file for ideas for future issues. It is also useful to have separate files for items such as book reviews, reader correspondence, contact details, and so forth.
If you keep electronic files on your computer, make sure you have a system for giving them names you will remember. It is useful to put incoming editorial material into Word files, so you can edit them, and it is helpful to keep separate folders for each issue of the magazine, with a contents listing in each issue’s folder so you can keep track of what you are expecting, what you have received and what has been completed or sent to design or print.