Custom Publishing | Custom Media | Imagination Publishing

I’ve been working in the “free” media for a long time. I edited the alternative paper in Atlanta, Creative Loafing, one of those that turn up in boxes on street corners all over town and serve as either a great reference for what to do on Saturday night or to keep the rain off your head.

What I learned from the week I had to ride in the delivery truck to see how that part of the business worked was that the more promptly we got them there, the nicer they looked, the grabbier the cover, the fewer we had to pick up when we went back with next week’s paper. The whole trick was just getting it in their hands. Distribution is often the weak leg of any publication’s stool. If you can’t get it to them, they can’t read it.

Deliver the Paper

In a digital age, you still have to “deliver the paper.” Just like that big thump a few of us still love when the Sunday paper hits the front porch, readers need to look forward to getting their copy, to reading the publication they subscribe to. They have to carve out a time to dedicate to it.

More and more associations are considering going all digital, eliminating the print version of their publication. They can save themselves the cost of manufacturing and postage, position themselves as more environmentally friendly and give their members information in a timely fashion and a format they use all day.

Several problems with this approach.

• Any advertising sales offset disappears. If you are paying for high quality creative, either internally produced or by a custom publisher, and you intend to keep providing high quality content, the digital format may cost you more, not less. Digital ad space is so cheap, so hard to sell and there’s so much of it that you’ll get pennies on the dollar if you’re lucky.
• They won’t open it. Without the grabby cover and the nice looking printed piece actually landing on their desks, you’re just as deletable as today’s promo from Amazon. And, trust me, they will delete it. If it’s read it now or read it later, reading it never will win.
• Most association databases suck. I say this based on bitter experience. We end up suppressing 20% of email addresses on some lists because members have not updated their profiles and the association can’t or won’t clean its list. Of the ones who get it, let’s say +/- 4% open it. Of those, +/- 50% actually read it, any of it. That means that if you have 5,000 members, you just sort of communicated with 800 of them.
• Skimming, scanning, browsing—not reading. The digital medium lends itself to quick hits of information in multiple media. No one reads a 100-page white paper online. No one reads even an 8-page in-depth feature story online. If it’s really, really interesting bordering on fascinating, we may print it out in order to read on a plane. But you have just made that less likely. If the burden is on the reader, the reader won’t do it.

Think about it: maybe you’re focusing on the wrong thing. Maybe you’re focusing on cost cutting or saving trees, timeliness or pulling them to your website. Maybe what you should be focusing on is deliverability. If you can’t deliver it, they can’t read it, hence none of your intended outcomes will happen.