Hi,

I thought I'd share this with you all...

http://www.magcloud.com/home

looks to be a brand new beta service to print "magazines" on 90lb stock and they distribute/ship as well.  I'm going to use them for my next publishing project but can't speak from personal experience yet.

looks like another alternative in the print on demand market.

Full color. Expensive and limited, but interesting. Thanks for posting it.

Paul

At the moment, it's 20 cents a page, plus $1.40 for shipping, plus your markup. And it ships only to US addresses.

So really very expensive, but worth keeping an eye on.

Graham

More limiting, I think, is it looks like there's only one available trim size. If digest size (half size) pages were ten cents it would be a lot more viable. Imagine a thirty page full color edition of Bacchanal.

Paul

We can do magazines.

Our standard POD rates are:
$.35 for saddle stitch binding.
$1.00 for a standard 10pt cover (full color)
$.022 for B&W pages
$.10 for color pages.
Standard interior paper is 60lb offset white. But can upgrade to glossy for $.02 a page.

You can have mixed B&W and color in the same publication. Though for a saddle stitched book like a magazine your color pages would have to come in matched pairs. Ala, for a 20 page mag, page 1 and 20 would be match, 2 and 19, etc.

You can avoid the cover cost if you have a mag with a self cover. So if you wanted to print a 20 page mag, 10 pages color and 10 B&W, with a self cover, it would cost $1.57 to print. $1.97 if it were all upgraded to an 80lb gloss.

For us to dropship to your customers, we charge $.25 per saddle stitched book/mag and then actual shipping charges only. By whichever USPS service you prefer. We can batch that out order by order, of if you wanted to have stock on hand with us to ship individual packages out over time, you can establish a small shipping fund with which we can do that. If its a gaming oriented mag, we can talk about possible inclusion in our retail, wholesale and master distribution programs as well.

What they are offering seems kind of expensive. But might have value for inclusion in their store front if they can get some traction there offering a wide variety of magazines.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.guildofblades.com/retailgroup.php
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com

i applied for publishing access through them.  i realize they're not inexpensive but like that they are at least a slightly different model and going after a shift in the market.  my experiences with Blurb and Lulu have been moderate and not entirely satisfying.

I'm in the MagCloud beta, so I'll let you know how it all works out.  I've been hot for the magazine format ever since I saw a copy of Mike Pohjola's game Tahti.