Rebooting Retro Gaming Magazine Part 1 - Where We Started

Several years ago my small team at the time and me launched Retro Gaming Magazine in print (he had been running the website for a while prior and since). We completed two issues of the magazine before we called it quits. We didn't stop producing it because it was not popular, we stopped because we only had two staff members (myself and one writer) producing content for the magazine. Now a few years later, I am thinking about rebooting the publication.

For those interested in reading the two issues we release oh so long ago, they are freely available:
http://retrogamingmagazine.com/buy-rgm/
and Google Play:
Issue #1 - https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Carl_Williams_Retro_Gaming_Magazine_1?id=6Fv1AgAAQBAJ
Issue #2 - https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Hyper_Focused_Media_Retro_Gaming_Magazine_2_Fan_Tr?id=19t8AwAAQBAJ

There are almost twenty other locations to download the PDF's but those above are the easiest.

Anyhow, it is tough launching a magazine today - it is certainly harder than launching a website. There is a ton of money and effort involved before you ever sell the first issue. My plan is to detail the journey to relaunch Retro Gaming Magazine in print. I do plan on making it available for purchase in as many places as I possibly can (even here on Steemit).

First, before you can get started you have to decide on a lot of things. Iron out the rough wrinkles first. This, for me, is finding the staff to write the content (trust me, one or two people cannot keep up the work load of a magazine). Once you have your staff brought together then you have to figure out the next step.

How many pages will each issue contain? This is another problem of print magazines. Limitations. On the Internet if you have a writer that likes to write long articles, they can run wild. In magazines there is a severe limit placed on articles - there is only so much space on a page and only so many pages in a magazine. We are planning on keeping the page count to 40 pages per issue. Some reading this may think that is simply not enough room to produce quality articles. I beg to differ.

Advertisers. This is the lifeblood of a magazine. Without advertisers you are going to have to rely 100% on profits off of sales. This is not a good position to be in, no matter how much money you have to burn. Advertising revenue is often used to finance the next issue of the magazine - pay writers, pay the graphic designer, pay for printing, and to advertise the publication. Advertising cuts down on the pages available for original content so keeping ads to a minimum is the goal but that puts a strain on the ads you do run. How so? The fewer ads you run, the more you have to charge per ad to help with the costs of operating the magazine.

Now that you have figured out your page count (remember, we are going with 40 pages total) you can then decide on what content to put in the magazine. Oh, before I get too far into this, remember, you are losing six pages right off the bat (cover, inside front cover, facing page, back cover, inside back cover and also the facing page there). These are pages that are traditionally reserved for the ads (other than the cover, and sometimes back cover). That leaves an automatic loss of four to five pages. Other than the cover, the rest of those pages are traditionally reserved for ads of some kind. For RGM that leaves us about 34 to 35 pages for content, if we don't reserve additional pages inside the magazine for advertising. At the moment we do not have any ads sold so we will probably buck the trend so to speak and put content on as many pages as possible.

For indie publications like RGM we have to push some sales before we can attract advertisers and even then it is not going to be easy.

Next, if you are going to produce a print magazine you have to do things that are unique. Why would fans want to pay you to get a copy? Why would they part with their money to read your work when there are thousands of websites giving people content for free.

We thought long and hard about this with RGM. That is why our first issue featured direct comparisons of many Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis cross platform games. The final list, culled from the 200+ games that saw release on both platforms, was voted on by fans on Facebook, Twitter, many forums, etc. The votes were tallied and we took into account which version won the debate and then writers that agreed with that took up the task of putting those games into print.

One thing that made us mad at gaming publications of the past was that VERY rarely they took a stand on one version of a game being better than the other. Many publications pulled this "be happy with whatever version you get" crap nearly every holiday season with their "buyer's guides". We did not want to do that with our chance at this. That is why we clearly picked a winner in each comparison in issue #1 and we picked an odd number of games so there would be a clear winning console.

We also didn't have any paid ads in the first issue. The couple of ads that we ran were cross promotion with others that were instrumental in helping us reach new readers, fans, and friends in the gaming community. That is why we ran an article on gaming ads. Rather than run "retro ads" like other "retro publications" do, we did an article on them and pointed out the worst, most insulting ones.

Another thing we did in RGM was to feature new games for old consoles. Call it "new retro" or "neo retro" or whatever but we featured it prominently in the pages of RGM. From Pyramid Plunder (TG-16 CD-ROM) to Sacred Line (Sega Genesis) to PC and Commodore 64 homebrew/indie games - we wanted to feature it in the pages of RGM. Fan response was great.

Finally, we knew we would not have a lot of ads so we went with wrap around covers. This was our way of giving to the fans that purchased the print edition. A little something they could enjoy. A thank you for the support. Also the versus articles were naturally more compelling in print where you could lay the mag down and see it spread out. The free PDF was the whole magazine but it was just not the same as holding the mag and laying it out and seeing those two page wide spreads peering back at you.

We are going to be bringing all of that back when we relaunch. We are going to bring gaming publications a new high watermark. RGM will not feature white pages with two to four narrow columns of text and one or two pics per page. We need your help to do it though. Who wants to see more of what it takes to launch a magazine? All it takes is a little comment, an upvote, something to let me know you want to see more behind the scenes.