The Five Silver Bullets of a Winning Publishing Strategy

If your magazine performs well in these five categories, you win everything.

It’s a safe bet that your magazine operates under some kind of business strategy. Whether it’s supported by advertising, subscriptions, newsstand sales or member dues, odds are you have some kind of clear picture of what constitutes publishing success from issue to issue.

But do you have a publishing strategy to support that business strategy?

Surprisingly, too many magazines operate in the dark when it comes to a basic concern like reader loyalty. What can a publication do to engender it? And how can it be sustained over time?

Here are the five key actions your magazine must take on every single page in order to keep readers engaged and returning:

• Invite: Is your magazine easy to read? Is it well-organized with a clear and rational hierarchy of information? Does it look and feel substantial, and worth your audience’s time?

• Engage: Are you grabbing readers with the effective use of access points? Are you including image captions that do more than just describe the content of the image? Are your headlines provocative and inspiring, rather than literal and descriptive?

• Educate: Does your content tell a story that needs to be told? Are you giving your readers information in a verbal style and a visual format that enhances their understanding of the topic?

• Evaluate: Are you checking in with your audience to assess their reading experience, but more to the point — are you giving them the opportunity to assess it for themselves?

• Inspire: Are you providing your readers with an action or a destination that follows their completion of the content? Are you actively demonstrating your publication’s value proposition by extending your audience’s experience beyond the pages of the issue?

Your answers to these questions should be in the affirmative. If they’re not — or if you’re unsure — stop what you’re doing and assemble your editorial team. This is too important to let slide. Publishing teams frequently neglect answering these existential questions, often assuming that a) Everything is fine; and/or b) There’s just no time in this industry for rhetorical discussions.

This is understandable. For too many magazines, reader feedback is vanishingly rare, and when it occurs, it focuses on the negative. It’s easy to dismiss a complaint as the product of a crank. And the non-stop juggernaut of a typical magazine production schedule doesn’t lend itself to periods of introspection, especially when gathering viewpoints from a full team of stakeholders.

But forgoing this process is destructive. Your audience is being exposed to an ever-shifting media landscape. It isn’t that your magazine has to compete with the likes of social media and video games (it does, but that’s the wrong fight). It has to compete with magazines that constantly assess their own performance against those five bullet points above. And those magazines can afford to make that evaluation and evolve accordingly because the process is baked into their publishing strategy. 

That’s the value of approaching your publication — and every task required to produce it — strategically. With a clear set of goals and a leadership that embraces questions, your whole team will be able to contribute with enthusiasm and purpose, elevating your content and rewarding readers with the fruits of their labors. That creates loyalty, both inside and outside the publishing office.

Need help but you don’t know where to start? A complimentary audit is a great way to take the pulse of your magazine and staff. Reach out to Quarto Creative to get started: contact@quartocreative.com.