Print publishers make money from copy sales and advertising. Some publishers rely mainly on advertising, others on copy sales, but most newspapers and magazines make money from a mix of the two.

The balance between advertising and copy sales revenue is important. Advertising driven publishers approach their business in a different way to copy sales driven publishers.

Copy Sales

Publishers rarely keep all copy sales revenue. Newspapers, magazines and books usually sell through newsagents, bookstores and other retailers. Retailers keep between 30 and 40 percent of the cover price.

Sometimes distributors take a slice of copy sales revenue. Usually distributors charge a fixed fee per copy delivered.

Sell-through rates

Retailers rarely sell all the copies they get of a title. Publishers talk of sell-through rates – the percentage sold.

Most publishers, particularly those chasing advertising sales regard a sell-out as failure. It means they didn’t maximise their circulation – which is what they sell to advertisers.

Long established, popular, frequently published titles often have better sell through rates than new or irregular publications.

Revenue lags sales

Publishers have to wait weeks or months to get copy sales revenue as it trickles back from the reader, through the retailer and distributor.

Printers often require payment – or a guarantee of payment before they print. So a publisher needs to carry the costs of at least three editions of a monthly title before seeing a penny of sales revenue. The investment is more in the case of weeklies, less in the case of bi-monthlies and quarterly publications.

Subscriptions

Revenue lag explains why publishers like selling direct to readers through subscription sales.

With subscriptions, publishers get their money upfront – usually a year in advance. Some publications offer two-year and even three-year subscriptions.

Publisher keep all the revenue – there’s no retailer cut, although they pay the cost of mailing out subscriptions.

Advertising

Publishers make Advertising sales revenue by selling ‘space’ in their titles.

Most publishers set aside a number of pages or parts of pages for advertisers. They have an advertising ratio.

Paid for publications usually have a lower advertising ratio than free publications – although this is not always true.

There are different types of advertising. Display advertising means larger and more colourful ads – often with creative text and images. Classified advertising is often text-only with a minimum of graphics.

Magazines typically sell advertising by the page, although they offer double page spreads, half pages and other formats. Newspapers will sell pages, but they also sell column centimetres (or column inches).

The more you buy the cheaper it gets

The more an advertiser buys, the cheaper the rate per column centimetre (or page if they are buying magazine advertising).

A full-page is cheaper than two half pages and so on. Publishers offer advertisers discounts if they commit to buying a series of advertising over a longer time. So, booking a year’s worth of advertisements in a monthly magazine is cheaper than buying 12 single advertisements.

Some advertising positions attract a premium rate. On newspapers this is the front page and maybe the front pages of sections such as business.

Magazines typically charge extra for the back cover and possibly the inside front cover. Successful titles can charge a premium for early right hand pages or other attractive sites.

Agencies and commission

Specialist media buying companies buy most advertising. They develop strategies for their clients and negotiate with publishers. Publishers pay media buyers a commission. Typically this is 10 to 20 percent of the booking’s value. In return for commission, media buyer agree to pay invoices on a set date.

Advertisers who buy their own space are known as direct clients. They often haggle over prices, but unless they are large-scale buyers, they have less clout than agencies. It's often harder to collect money from direct clients.

Rate cards

Publishers issue rate cards. Historically they used card, but now they are usually available online. Rate card prices are often negotiable.

Advertorial

Advertorial is when publishers offer advertising linked to editorial features. In some cases editorial integrity is up for sale.

Advertorial deals come in different flavours. Many publications are entirely advertorial – if an advertiser pays for space they have a say over the publication’s editorial content.

More credible titles wall off areas of content for advertorial. These might be clearly marked with terms like “advertising supplement” or “special advertising feature”. This isn’t always transparent to readers.

Some publishers run editorial-style material provided by advertisers and charge for it. Others allow advertisers to send copy for inclusion next to advertisements.

Publishers may or may not allow advertisers control over advertorial content. Some publishers have journalists write advertiser-friendly copy for these sections, others keep a strict demarcation between editorial and advertising.

Business model

Free publications are more likely to run advertorial and compromise editorial integrity for commercial consideration than paid-for titles.

Paid titles are less likely to take this approach. Some paid titles have little in the way of advertising and charge a hefty premium for quality editorial content. This works best if they can manage a high circulation.

Have I missed anything here? Do you have any questions about how this works?

In the golden age of print publishing, copy sales were an important source of revenue.

With publishers like Rupert Murdoch building online pay walls for news sites, selling publications to readers, not giving them away, could enjoy a renaissance.

Here's how copy sales fit in the old school print publishing business model I grew up with.

Print publishers rarely keep all the money from copy sales.

Newsagents, book stores and other outlets sell newspapers, magazines and books. They earn a margin of around 30% of a magazine or book's cover price.

Margins are lower for newspapers, but newsagents make it up with volume plus they can sell customers extra items with better margins.

In some cases distributors take a second slice of the sales revenue. Either a percentage or a fixed fee per copy.

Sell-through rates

Retailers rarely sell every copy of their newspapers and magazines.

Publishers talk of sell-through rates – that’s the percentage sold. Retailers usually send unsold magazines – usually just the masthead – back to distributors to get a refund on unsold copies. Newspapers are similar. We call the copies sent back ' returns'.

Poorly managed titles have a low sell-through rate. Others can have a higher rate.

Some publications sell out – but this is rare. Publishers regard selling-out as a failure because it means they don't get maximise sales. Newsagents like this because they don’t have to worry about returns.

Returns are controversial with newsagents and retailer because they often have to carry the cost of holding stock on behalf of publishers.

Long established, popular, frequently-published titles typically have better sell through rates than new or irregular publications. That's largely because publishers have more information to help them plan print runs and know where to send copies.

Revenue lags sales

Copy sales revenue for monthly titles usually takes a month or two to trickle from the reader, through the retailer and distributor back to the publisher.

Printers want payment – or a guarantee of payment before the presses role. So a publisher needs to carry the costs of at least three editions of a monthly title before seeing a penny in copy sales revenue.

This would cost more for weeklies, less for bi-monthlies and quarterly magazines.

Revenue lag explains why so many publishers are keen to sell their titles direct to readers through subscription sales.

Subscriptions are lucrative for publishers.

First, the money arrives upfront – usually a year in advance. Some publications offer two-year and even three-year subscriptions.

Second, a publisher gets to keep all the revenue – there’s no retailer cut – but mailing out subscriptions has a cost attached and there's a small management fee paid if an external company handles subscriptions.

Have I missed anything here? Do you have any questions about how this works? Please add your comments and questions below or get in touch through my contact page.

I’ve never believed that print is dead. I’ve always believed that there are two problems with print journalism today. One is lack of advertising, some parts of which will come back, and two, when nobody is buying your magazine or your newspaper, it’s because you’re not writing what people want to read.

Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York and media magnate quoted in The New York Times after his company's acquisition of Businessweek magazine.

I'd add a third point to Bloomberg's. Print started on the path to unsustainability twenty years ago when corporate spivs started buying media companies and pumping them dry to squeeze unrealistic profits from them.

You can't run a media business like a grocery store.

There's no question the Internet is hurting print publications, but the technology is speeding up a process that was already well under way long before anyone Googled anything.

In The winter of journalism's content (no longer on-line), The Australian reports online publishing, widely expected to supplant newspapers and magazines, will only go so far in replacing them and leave a gaping hole.

This worries me.

The economics of online publishing mean there isn't enough money to pay for in-depth news investigations and searching features on politics, crime and other social issues important to modern democracies.

Advertisers are bailing out of print publications. They are drawn to the web because they see it as a more cost-effective and accountable medium (that's disputable).

In particular, online advertisers like to place their messages next to niche interest stories to more closely target interested readers. For example car makers prefer to buy banner ads on pages featuring stories about driving.

Even if a publisher could find the money to produce hard news stories, advertisers wouldn't want them.

The obvious answer is to publish fewer hard news stories and more of the marketable lightweight fluff. However, traditionally those difficult, hard news stories sold printed newspapers and dragged in readers in the first place.

But this vicious economic cycle is nothing compared to what can happen in a society that no longer has a practical mechanism for scrutinising governments and out-of-control corporations.

Any fool can write a good press release that hits its target audience and creates an impact.

Writing one that fails requires more work. There are people who have mastered the art. As an editor I've seen some great efforts over the years. I'd like to share them with you.

Here are my top ten tips for making sure press releases get minimum attention:

1. Cripple its chances of reaching editors and journalists

Everyone can read plain text messages in the body of an email. The message will almost certainly get through to any kind of desktop email clients, all flavours of web mail, as well as Blackberries, iPhones and Palm Pilots.

To reach less than 100 percent of your potential audience, try putting some of these clever barriers in the way.

Attachments are an effective way of cutting down the reach of your press release. People reading email on mobile devices have trouble reading them. Spam filters can treat them with suspicion and if you're lucky the recipient may use Lotus Notes as a client and have difficulty decoding the attachment.

Another advantage of attachments is that you can trim your audience further by using difficult-to-open file formats: such as the new .docx file format used by Word 2007 – many journalists will struggle to read them.

Attachments are great for bulking up the size of your release so it won't squeeze through email gateways. If you're  clever you can put high-resolution logos in, say, your Word attachments.  These add  nothing to the press release but can swiftly push the file size over the email gateway threshold.

A further reason for a sending press release as an attachment is its invisibility to email search. So, when a journalist decides to look for your press release among the hundreds and thousands in their email in-box, it will be extremely difficult to find.

2. Minimize relevance

One of the best ways to make sure your press release fails is to make sure it has no relevance to any sane audience. For example, if you are a technology company and you buy a new fleet of cars you can squander your PR budget and make sure any future release goes directly to an editor's recycle bin by sending the story to the technology press.

3. Send it out whenever

Timeliness is everything. So by sending out releases when you feel like it, you can boost your chances of failure. Better still, for print publications try waiting until five minutes after the final deadline. For online publications wait until the story has already broken elsewhere.

4. Organize schedules so contacts are unavailable for interview

Good journalists are such annoying creatures. Rather than printing your press release verbatim and passing the contact details over to their advertising departments, they may want to speak to the people mentioned in your releases. A tried and tested technique for avoiding these complications is to send the people overseas shortly after dispatching the release. International communications are good these days, so just packing them off to a partner conference in Atlanta isn't good enough, you need to make sure they are on an 18 hour trans-pacific flight or, better still, holidaying on a remote island.

5. Use poor writing skills

Obvious when you think about it. If your writing is poor and confused so that editors and journalists can't understand your message you'll kill two birds with one stone.

First, you'll make sure the first message gets spiked in the too hard basket.

But second, as a bonus, you can establish your reputation as an illiterate idiot that isn't worth bothering with under any circumstances. That way, your future releases will go straight to the junk pile without even being read.

6. Try bullying

Sadly this powerful technique is underused. By threatening to talk to a journalist's editor, or an editor's boss about their poor response to your press release you can permanently undermine your relationship with scores of people (remember journalists talk to each other so this is an efficient way of burning lots of bridges).

Another approach is to tell the journalist the company in question is advertising thus triggering their professional editorial independence.

7. Don't bother with photographs

Journalists and editors like photographs. They love good photographs. By making sure they are no photographs of any description you'll increase the chances that your press release is regarded as totally useless. If you think that's taking things too far, try sending out crappy, unusable photos. Photos with dozens of un-named people work well in this respect. Getting people to hold champagne glasses, stand in front of company logos, gather around a totally unreadable normal-size bank cheque or impersonate public enemy number one mug shots are all effective techniques for creating instantly ignorable press release photographs.

8. Send it to everyone regardless

This is a great way to upset journalists and degrade both your personal and company reputation. At the same time if you work for a PR agency you can bill the client heaps for having a, er, comprehensive, mailing list and then bill them for time as you and your staff spend all day on the phone dealing with angry editors.

9. Keep things as dull as possible

Journalists prefer interesting stories. Public relations professionals recognise this and use clever tricks like passive sentences, boring ideas, irrelevant background facts, tired clichéd adjectives and implausible anodyne quotes to turn them off and help speed their press releases on their way to the great recycle bin in the sky.

In house and government public relations people are usually better at delivering boring releases than agency staff – if you're worried your writing sparkles too much, they have much to teach you.

10. Make sure the subject line obscures the message

Even experienced public relations operatives can slip up by giving an email release an interesting subject line. The danger is that after putting in all the hard work required to guarantee nobody takes the slightest notice of their press release they use active language to put a relevant timely subject line message that tempts editors and journalists to open the document and read more.

The good news is there are fail-safe subject lines that are certain to turn off editors and journalists so they can just skip past your release. A classic subject line like press release will probably work, if that's too simple try important press release or important press release from Company Name.

A neat by-product of badly written subject lines is they can fool spam detection engines into rejecting a message altogether; phrases like important announcement from Company Name or message for Clark Kent can come in handy here.

New Zealand's technology press is well past its 'peak oil' moment but there's still life left.

Once there were more than 20 active locally published print titles covering computers and related technologies. At the top of the market, the collective circulation of these titles would have run to more than 400,000. Today the total circulation of local technology titles is under 100,000. Some titles have gone to the great recycle bin in the sky. Others, particularly those serving smaller niches, have now switched to online-only publication. Others may follow.

We'll look at the online titles in a separate post later, but for now here's a master list of the main specialist technology publications published in New Zealand:

ComputerWorld New Zealand: A weekly information technology newspaper, it frequently breaks local news stories ahead of mainstream newspapers. The print edition is in tabloid format. ComputerWorld is mainly read by senior technical executives and other people who work with IT. The title has been printed in New Zealand for more than 20 years.

ComputerWorld is now the dominant specialist IT news publication in New Zealand.

New Zealand PC World: A monthly A4 magazine mainly sold on bookstands, in supermarkets and petrol stations. It's read by technical types who get to choose or heavily influence the products they use at work and home. Contains reviews and how to features. Coverage is largely focused on personal aspects of computing. Includes some games and consumer electronics material. The August edition featured the recently introduced 3G iPhone on the cover — an sign that PC World had moved way beyond just covering conventional desktop computers.

For more information see: PC World

New Zealand Reseller News: Fortnightly tabloid newspaper for people who sell and otherwise work in the IT channel. Has strong news focus with emphasis on business and people stories long with regular advice features and commentary. Now more than ten years old. New Zealand Reseller News is only sent to qualified readers (i.e. people who work in the IT channel)  who have requested the publication. In recent months Reseller has broadened its coverage to include more product related stories.

CIO New Zealand: Influential monthly A4 magazine focusing on the business and strategic aspects of large scale IT. Mainly feature based. Read by the people who make corporate buying decisions in large organisations. Published since 1999. Has a strong, active community with a comprehensive events program.

Gear Guide: PC World spin off now on its second edition, essentially a buyers' guide for home computer products and consumer electronics. A4 magazine format, sold on bookstands.

Tone: Good-looking monthly A4 bookstand magazine covering home entertainment, technology and hi-fi. Heavy product focus, i.e. mainly contains product reviews and product-related features. Technology content is relatively minor compared to Tone's consumer electronics coverage.

The Channel: Monthly A4 magazine for the IT channel. Feature driven, lots of guides and "how to" stories. Now two years old.  Distributed to people working in 'the IT channel'. Much of the content is paid 'advertorial'. Tends to run pages of photographs from events without identifying the people.

iStart: Quarterly A4 magazine for "business and IT managers needing to improve their business with web based technology." Mainly contains paid-for case studies. Has appeared on bookstands in the past, but the print edition doesn't appear to be on sale any more (can anyone confirm this?).

New Zealand Netguide: Monthly A5 bookstand magazine aimed at less-technical readers. As the name suggests the publication largely covers Internet related stories, but it also has product reviews and some games coverage. Recently sold by ACP Media to Action Media.

Telecommunications Review: According to the web site's subscription's page the print edition of Telecommunications Review will return in May or June 2008. At the time of writing this hasn't happened. When Telecommunications Review was previously published it was a monthly, glossy trade newspaper for people working in the industry and their more technically advanced customers — in practice this meant pages of stories about Telecom New Zealand the dominant player in this market.

IT Brief: A monthly A4 magazine of "peer reviewed industry comment" (although some of the content appears to be written by public relations companies) aimed at senior business and IT executives within corporate, government and (sic) enterprise businesses.  Disclosure: I've only seen a photocopied version of this so far.

Interface: Published eight times a year (twice each school term), Interface is an A4 magazine aimed at school teachers responsible for using computers and information technology in the classroom. There's a fuller description of Interface in a separate post here.

Actv8: A quarterly free magazine for school students. Distributed via schools and supported by the Ministry of Education. Actv8 promotes careers and higher education courses in technology related areas. The stories tend to be short and written for teenagers, the design is colourful and loose.

MyMobile: A monthly mobile phone buyers guide with reviews and articles on how to get the most from mobile phones. Sold on bookstands. A5 size.

Few technology publications are as specialist as Interface; a computer magazine for New Zealand school teachers.

Interface is now one year old and published eight times a year – a strange schedule until you realise that it means two editions each school term. The glossy A4 magazine typically runs to 40 pages, 36 printed on gloss art paper and the cover on heavier stock.

While the nominal cover price is $8, and you can buy copies, Interface doesn't sell on bookstands. Most readers are subscribers and there are deals for multiple subscriptions going to a single school. The circulation is not audited, but according to the publisher it sits at around 8,000.

About 30 percent of the pages are advertising – there's solid support from educational specialists as well as top technology brands such as Toshiba and Hewlett-Packard.

Interface is published by G Media, in effect, the editor Greg Adams. Editorially it has a mixture of news and case studies along with how-to stories. It feels more like a teaching resource than a conventional computer magazine or newspaper, though it typically leads with news stories on the front cover.

Most, if not all, content is locally written – often by practicing teachers. The writing style is mainly journalistic, even chatty and shows Adams' newspaper pedigree.

Starting in July, Interface will also be published in Malaysia, inserted into Just English, a monthly teacher's magazine with a circulation of 10,000.

PC World's ABC circulation of 15,565 and Nielsen readership figure of 148,000, makes it New Zealand's most-read specialist technology publication by a country mile. It's a monthly magazine, which in New Zealand means 11 issues a year with a combined December and January edition.

In August 2006 Fairfax Business Media bought the New Zealand licence for PC World from IDG. In that year Fairfax acquired the bulk of IDG's NZ business picking up four titles – two titles, Unlimited and Actv8, went to Infego under a separate agreement and one title, Fast Forward closed.

Before August 2006 IDG published PC World in New Zealand by IDG since 1989 when it was a tabloid supplement in ComputerWorld.

At the time of writing PC World is typically 112 A4 colour pages printed on gloss art paper, plus a cover on heavier stock. Advertising makes up about a quarter to a third of the pages. It's perfect bound with a DVD disc which is inserted and not cover mounted.

The magazine is mainly sold on bookstands with a cover price of NZ$8.90 – this is competitive with larger, overseas published titles. The magazine can also be found in petrol stations and supermarkets. A significant number of readers are subscribers.

PC World's readers are mainly highly educated, well-heeled men. It occupies the same market niche as Australian Personal Computer, PC User and PC Authority. It has new product reviews, group tests, news features and plenty of how-to advice stories.

Typically well over half the editorial content is locally written and the overseas material is given a local slant and boosted with local boxes and other material. PC World's New Zealand staff and freelance journalists are highly regarded.

Strictly speaking New Zealand PC World doesn't have any direct print competitors, its nearest local rival for readers and advertising revenue is ACP's New Zealand NetGuide, but that title sells to less advanced users.