Book Reviews

If there are books produced on your subject area, they can be included in a review section. You can also include reviews of audio or videotapes, CDs, CD Roms, DVDs and software packages. You might also mention other relevant magazines in your field in this section, as long as you do not feel it would encourage your readers to leave you and subscribe to the other publications instead. If you would like to get books for review, you should contact the review department of relevant publishers, give them details of your magazine and ask to be put on their mailing list; when you find a book that you think would be relevant to your readers ask for one to be sent as a review copy.

You should then send it to an appropriate person to review and, once the review has been published, send a copy of it to the publisher of the book. Before you send the copy for review, remember to take down details of the title, author, publisher, ISBN number, date of publication, number of pages, page size and price, as well as scanning in the cover (or getting the publisher to send you an image of the cover) to accompany the review. Publishers will also let you have photos and biographical details of authors and, if you wish, will often arrange for an interview with a book author as well.

Research Reports

This is another useful area, especially if your magazine has an academic, or practical skills, bias. If you have the resources and contacts, you may want to commission, or produce, research reports yourself, otherwise you will need to find out what has been produced in your field. Establishing good contacts with colleges, research institutes, commercial companies with research departments, and so forth, can help you source this kind of material.

Advertisements

Advertisements are a source of revenue and also help give a variety of content and style in your magazine. You need to think about how much advertising you wish to carry, as too much can make the magazine look more like a catalogue and put readers off. It is also important that it is clear what is an advertisement and what is editorial material. There is a ‘mid-way’ term here, which is sometimes referred to as ‘advertorial’; this means that an advertisement is combined in some way with editorial material, usually by an advertisement being accompanied by input from the editorial team itself – such items should really be marked as ‘Advertising Features’ to avoid misunderstanding or giving the impression that the magazine endorses the products or services featured in the advertisement. Chapter 9 deals with advertising.

Readers’ Offers

A readers’ offer is something that is offered to readers of a magazine at a discount or with some other accompanying benefit. Some examples of readers’ offers are:

• discounts on books
• low rate insurance
• free cinema tickets
• reduced rate hotel accommodation
• special prices on garden plants and furniture

 

Readers’ offers can be of benefit all round: to the reader because they bring a clear benefit, to the publisher because they attract and retain readers and to the offering organisation as they publicise their products or services.

One particular readers’ offer that many magazines feature is for reduced rate subscriptions to the magazine itself – this may be in the form of a reduction on the cover price, or an additional number of issues if a year or more’s subscription is taken out. Another kind of offer is where a product, or a sample of a product, (for example, moisturising cream, chocolate, a diary, a small paperback book) is attached to the magazine (usually packaged with it in a polythene envelope or glued to it on an inside page). Although some of these offers tend to be found in expensive, commercially produced, magazines, the idea can be copied by others on a lower budget. See Appendix 2 for examples of Readers’ Offers.