StartingAMagazine.psd
with good internet magazine's autumn/winter issue in the printers' hands, i thought this would be a great time for me to spend a moment doing a bit of a post-mortem after completing this volume of two issues. (if you haven't seen me talk about it, good internet is a print magazine for hobbyist webweavers and indie web netizens, announced in january 2025.)
here's some things you should know if you want to launch a print magazine these days:
doing this entirely on your own is unmanageable. it's untenable. it's unreasonable. i cannot under any circumstances recommend someone do this alone, even with external artist and writer submissions. not only is it difficult, but you have zero room for anything happening to you, which is exactly what happened when i began having health issues in september 2025. i had no plan, no backup, and nobody able to work on the magazine in my absence. as a result, i fell behind in designing the magazine, couldn't send off final proofs to writers, and ended up providing a less-than-stellar editor experience for those writers—in addition to everything else i feel like i dropped the ball with. you need help: sourcing ethical and independent printers, communicating with them, working and editing with writers/artists, setting up the website/content management system, transferring all the stories into the same format for laying out, fitting them to the CMS, managing email lists and making sure everything works, figuring out subscriptions and gating content correctly... there's more that i won't go into, but i think that illustrates it enough. doing this alone is doable but a) you will miss every deadline you set and b) you will burn out. even if you manage to get out a few issues, it is not sustainable. i'm not saying don't do it—i'm saying don't do it alone.
plan to spend money on your project. while i wish good internet would've broken even—especially with how much i had to charge for each magazine (astronomically priced compared to magazines printed at scale)—i was still having to pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket, particularly for shipping to europe and oceania. that was a lesson learned in itself. on the front end, i had costs i knew i'd have to pay for that would never be recouped: shipping weight scale, envelope sleeves, design software (purchased affinity as to try and not use adobe products), monthly stamps.com subscription (to get the lowest postage available to me), monthly digitalocean hosting, monthly mailgun subscription, and domain. having recurring paid subscriptions helped so much with this, though! the postage ended up coming out far more than originally planned with domestic purchases subsidizing the international purchases' postage as much as possible. for the spring issue, one magazine cost around
$34to ship internationally. next time, i think i'll work with a mailing service (or adding it on with my printer) instead of doing it all myself. i initially avoided it because i thought it wouldn't be worth the extra funds ($350+), but magazines would've made it out sooner and into folks' hands sooner if i had done that instead. it was worthy exchange of the labor.have a plan if going global. finding a european printer for the autumn/winter issue is proving to be better as an endeavor overall, but i essentially will have two sizes for this issue: 8.5"x11" magazine in the US and A4 elsewhere. having to retrofit the 8.5"x11" magazine to fit a larger size was both time-consuming and frustrating; it only added onto my stress in wanting to put out a product worth people's money while battling health problems.
if you build it, some will come. everything is building upon experiences, mistakes, lessons from the past—i come from a journalism background, i've done this professionally—and this was still incredibly hard. do not expect to build something that throngs of folks will flock to. you need people to spread the word for you! talking about this often with others was only part of getting the word out about the magazine, and i wish i'd had more bandwidth to promote good internet more, but on top of everything else, i couldn't manage it.
build systems that work for your workflow. i had to build an internal tracking system for managing purchases and making sure which ones were shipped. if this is handled externally, you would have to deal with this less, but this was still something i had to build on the fly in the middle of handling orders. i also had to make sure automation was set up so that digital editions could be purchased and then be instantly accessible—this happened via email in their inbox, but there are a ton of ways to handle purchases of digital items. i found lemonsqueezy.com to be the best option even though i didn't use them in the end.
plan for downtime, and establish a schedule after you've done it once. schedule breaks. working on a self-guided project without taking sufficient breaks or time away is going to lead to burnout. establish your printing schedule after you've seen how one issue goes. i initially set a pace of quarterly for good internet—that was a mistake. while magazines staffed with dozens of folks can churn out a monthly magazine or a quarterly magazine, a solo endeavor shouldn't be approached in the same way. good internet went down to two issues per year from that first lesson.
establish what your values are early on and stick to them. be able to recite your reasons for decisions you make and limitations you might actually have. it's just important. stick to them.
as for good internet, i'll be reducing the frequency more to an annual issue without more volunteer help. (if you have experience with indesign or affinity publisher, please reach out!) once this batch of magazines is sent out to everyone who ordered one, i can take some time offline, which i'm really looking forward to. :)
i'm so grateful to everyone who has supported the magazine; all of the amazing and talented writers who submitted articles and stories, all of the artists who donated their time and ability—thank you! you've made the magazine what it is. i'm glad i could play a small part.