Twenty years ago I wasn't writing fiction. I was on the board of a small publishing company in charge of launching a new monthly magazine. It was called <a href="http://www.flyer.co.uk/" target="_blank">Flyer</a> and I'm happy to say it's still going. Miracle really. That was in the middle of another recession, and it was only through using new technology -- what was then called desktop publishing -- that we managed to get it onto newsstands at all.

As a journalist I loved the creative side of publishing -- design, editing, writing. As a company director, though, I soon learned there was a lot more to creating a commercially successful publication than content. There was distribution, printing, marketing, merchandising. All skills that were beyond me frankly, which is why before I long I went back to writing and, not long after, books.

But the publishing world is at another crossroads now, a bigger one than DTP ever brought. Digital distribution. The end of paper for a lot of books, papers and magazines. I thought I'd try to imagine how I'd approach launching a magazine in this new world. And one of the first conclusions I reached surprised me. <em>Flyer</em> depended entirely on Macs. We couldn't have produced it on anything else. While I'd still probably use a Mac for design and editing today though, Apple's the last company I'd use to get my digital mag out there.

<!--more-->

James Kendrick, a great commentator on matters digital, got me thinking about this earlier in the week with his post <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-news/apple-8217s-subscription-policy-convinced-me-to-sell-my-ipad/957?tag=content;search-results-rivers" target="_blank">Apple’s subscription policy convinced me to sell my iPad</a>. I've got an iPad too, bought last October in San Francisco when I saw everyone at Bouchercon seemed to have one and felt left out. Having read about Apple's plans to control the sale of content through the iPad I must felt much the same way as James. It seems the regulatory authorities are taking a look at Apple's plans too. They involve demanding a thirty per cent cut of all sales of content through the app store -- and a new demand that, to all intents and purposes, the app store must be, for most people, the only place you can sell.

A closed market in other words. Going back to my <em>Flyer</em> magazine days it would be like a major newsagent chain saying, 'We will sell your title but only if you give it to us exclusively. Oh, and we'd like thirty per cent of any subscriptions you sell too.'

Subscriptions, by the way, were what made <em>Flyer</em> fly. People so loved the mag when it came out that a fantastic number took out discounted 12 months subs -- vital money in the bank for us.

Let's leave that aside though and think about what channel exclusivity means in practical terms today. I'm going to use a digital publishing analogy here -- one you could apply to books, magazines, anything that's mainly static print and images. A lot of the content on app stores doesn’t fit that bill. They're real apps -- programs that need to be 'run'. Text and pictures are static. They're effectively another form of a web site or a pdf. Content and content alone.

Let's say I wanted to put my publication out there for iPad users. The obvious option ought to be through Apple's own iBooks service. Except I can't see any other magazines there so it might not find many readers. Also I don't know anyone who uses iBooks. Also I can't see <em>The Fallen Angel</em> there yet though it's been out since the start of the month, and iBooks want £8.99 for my current paperback, <em>The Blue Demon</em>, which can be had on Amazon's rival Kindle service for £3.98. Less than half the price for exactly the same thing. iBooks doesn't sound the place for this magazine.

OK, well let's head to that very busy place the iPad app store. There are magazines on there aplenty, along with newspaper apps and lots of other singing and dancing stuff. If I wanted a magazine as an app -- in other words flashy video and interactive stuff -- I'd have no alternative but to employ some programmers to make one. How much? Seems as long as a piece of string. Maybe between $20,000 and $100,000. And that's just for the programming -- you'd still have to edit and 'publish' the thing separately too.

As I recall from my magazine days of twenty years ago... production costs can be the death of any publishing project. No small company with modest sales projections can undertake this kind of expense, and give away thirty per cent of its income to its distributor. Plus, you're building a wall round your publication. You've built an app for the iPad. Other rival tablets -- Android, Blackberry, Web OS, Windows -- won't run it. You'll need to incur extra expense just to get into those markets too, which may be small now but could be dominant in a couple of years.

This is just a magazine we're talking about. Words and pictures. I don't think it needs video and flash and fancy stuff. It's there to be read, not played with. Surely there has to be an easier solution. Well there is, though it's one that will place you in the hands of another dominant player, Amazon. We're back with Kindle. Not everyone's latched onto this yet, but Kindle isn't just that neat, lightweight inexpensive ereader a lot of people got for Christmas. It's a system, one that's agnostic about where it runs. You don't even need that ereader. You can download free Kindle apps for Macs, Windows, iPad, Android and probably other things I haven't heard of. Then you can link them up to a single Amazon account <em>and read your Kindle books and magazines on any device you choose.</em>

Note that word: choice. Apple don't like it and never have. Amazon's Kindle division realised it's the basis of everything some time back and have implemented choice wonderfully. At the moment I'm reading Stephen King's <em>Full Dark, No Stars.</em> I pulled down a sample to my iPad yesterday and decided to buy it. Read one story on the iPad, then another on the Kindle later in bed. When I switched from the iPad to the Kindle the latter knew where I'd left off reading when I closed down the former.

This is clever. As a reader I love it. Were I to be a magazine publisher again I'd be excited by the prospects Kindle offers. How would I get my magazine on there? I could fork out a fortune for Adobe In Design, download a special free Kindle plugin, and export things that way. But to be honest I think I'd pick up Apple Pages (£11.99 on the app store) and just export an epub for that. I haven't tried it but from what I've seen that would provide me with a nicely-designed Kindle magazine very easily, and one that would run on phones, tablets, Macs and PCs with no extra work whatsoever.

And Kindle's cut? Thirty per cent too. But then my production costs would be minimal. I wouldn't have to worry about programmers, expensive development bills and whether it would run on everything it was supposed to. Yes, I'd be locked into a single distributor. But my readers wouldn't be forced to buy their readers from a single manufacturer in order to consume what I was producing -- which would be the case if I were an Apple app store-only publication.

Twenty years ago the Mac made <em>Flyer</em> possible. If I tried to follow the Apple route to publishing a new title today I'd have to spend needless production money and find myself locked into a walled garden over which I had no control. If you're thinking of going into publishing yourself my advice is: avoid this. In the digital world you will, in all probability, have to face up the reality of a few, perhaps just one dominant distributor. But at least pick one who doesn't lock you into development costs you don't need, and ties your readers to buy their products -- and theirs alone -- in order to read the book or magazine you're working so hard to produce.

PS. It just occurred to me that Scrivener can export to epub too, and -- in the export dialog if not in the table below -- what it calls 'Kindle format .mobi'. I'm out of my depth here but perhaps a simple anthology or short story magazine could be handled directly through Scrivener. Here are the export formats for those who know about these things...

<a href="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Screen-shot-2011-02-19-at-11.57.25.png"><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-7489" title="Screen shot 2011-02-19 at 11.57.25" src="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Screen-shot-2011-02-19-at-11.57.25-640x994.png" alt="" width="640" height="994" /></a>