Education What To Do Next - Input Sought!

So, as reported in the Meh Thread, a long-term client representing the bulk of my billing has decided to take a different path - which leaves me in search of new revenue.

Back when I first started, I used to pitch to magazines. Most of these have now closed: in the UK we're pretty much left with nothing but PC Pro (a possibility, but it's very Windows-centric), The Official Raspberry Pi Magazine (MagPi and Hackspace as-was, poor pay), and Computeractive! (exclusively Windows-centric, noddy computing for beginners, not really my wheelhouse.)

I know The Register's keen to have me back again, but they've got no guaranteed freelance budget beyond year-end so that's not a long-term solution (unless I want to go work with them full time as a staffer, which they've offered before - at a salary that's decent for the market but half what I was earning before.) I could also pitch to Hack a Day - the direct competitor to my old client - and there's Make Magazine in the US, though I've had problems with them in the past (last time I spoke to them they got me to do a bunch of legwork for the annual Boards Guide then ghosted me without ever agreeing payment - though I think that was just a question of a screw-up rather than malice.)

Or... I could venture out on my own.

Newsletters
The current vogue for washed-up journos brave trendsetters is to launch a newsletter. Substack's the most popular for these, but has a bit of a Nazi problem so I'd prefer to use one of its competitors: there's Ghost and Beehiv, Ko-Fi started life as a donation platform but now offers memberships and Etsy-style storefronts, and there's Patreon (I signed up for an account there to grandfather myself into the old payment tiers before they changed, but I've never actually used it).

Some are true newsletter services, sent via email; others, including Medium (again, I've an account there) are paywalled website platforms either collecting a fixed-rate membership or paying RPM. In all cases, the idea's the same: an audience who pays to read what I write.

Pros:

• Literally just swapping one CMS for another.
• Full editorial independence.

Cons:

• I'd be responsible for building an audience from scratch...
• ...and you need a big audience. Nobody's paying more than a few quid a month tops, so unless you can get thousands of subscribers you're getting chicken-scratch. (The RPM model has an advantage here, in that you only need one article to "go viral" to cover your rent that month - but if it's paywalled, it's bleedin' hard to "go viral.")
• Every bugger's already doing it: apparently Beehiv alone had 10,000 newsletters as of 2023.

Digital Weeklies
So, here's an interesting twist very few people are attempting: why not bring back the weekly?

Readers of a certain vintage may remember seeing this, or something like it, on newsagents' shelves:



Home Computing Weekly. It's exactly what it sounds like: a weekly print publication launched in March '83 by Argus. It was shorter than the monthlies, obviously, and cheaper - supported by limited-colour printing on cheap paper rather than the full-colour glossy spreads of its monthly competitors.

Now, I'm not talking about launching a print publication, as much as I'd love to do exactly that: printing costs are through the roof, and there's distribution on top. 's why almost every magazine I've ever written for (Linux User & Developer, Custom PC, Micro Mart) have all closed their doors. I'm talking about launching a digital print publication.

What do I mean? Easy: it's a magazine-format publication, inspired by the old weeklies, but distributed as a PDF. You read it like you would a magazine, not an email you just skim over or ignore in your groaning inbox. I know it's not beyond me, 'cos...



I already did it. Kinda: that's a recreation of an Amiga Shopper page I made, designed to mimic the original as closely as I could, while teaching myself the open-source DTP package Scribus a few years ago. Now, to be fair, I've slept since and will have to re-learn how the hell I did it... but if I did it once, I can do it again.

Pros:

• It's a gimmick - nobody's launched a weekly in decades, it'll stand out from the crowd of email newsletters and paywalled blogs.
• I've always wanted to be the EIC of a classic print publication, and now I can - minus the huge upfront costs, 'cos there's no printing and distribution and I'm exclusively using free software.
• It feels like you could maybe charge more for a PDF magazine than you could an email newsletter, possibly?
• I could have a letters page! How much fun would that be?!

Cons:

• It's a lot more work than just throwing stuff into Ghost or Beehiv or whatever, though in theory only initially: once I've created template pages for the most common page layouts then it's pretty much exactly the same as throwing stuff into Ghost or Beehiv or whatever.
• I'd still need to use a third-party to take payment and distribute the PDFs.
• And I'd still need to build an audience from scratch, but hopefully the gimmick aspect would make that easier.
• It's a lot more work: I know I said this, but I'm talking even after templating is done. The launch issue of HCW, above, names no fewer than five staff members (editor, news editor, advertisement manager, assistant advertisement manager, managing director) and has an advert on Page 5 asking for people to sign up to join "our team of contributors" which includes... three named writers, from a quick scan. By Issue 68 the staff roster had risen to ten (ed., ass. ed., designer, managing ed., group ed., ad. manager, ass. ad. manager, divisional ad. manager, classified advertising, and chief executive) and... maybe eight contributing writers? I'm... me. One dude. It's a lot easier to do this kind of thing yourself on cheap computers than it was back in the '80s, but is it 18 times easier?

Then there's advertising. The weeklies' revenue came primarily from advertising, with 18 of Issue 68's 40 pages (including covers) being adverts (including the in-house classifieds service and a competition to win a grands' worth of games from Unique by completing a word search.) The cover price was pretty much only there to cover the cost of printing and distribution - with the newsagent taking a cut.

Now, I wouldn't have printing and (physical) distribution to cover, so would I just not run advertising? If I did run advertising, how can I keep the firewall between editorial and advertising when I'm the one handling both? After all, it's not enough to just do the right thing - you have to be seen to be doing the right thing. Would it feel anaemic without advertising? Would anyone actually want to advertise? It's not like the glory days when Software Warehouse would pay you thousands to put a 50-page onion-skin catalogue in there...

Then there's future-thinking: let's say it's a success. I'm a Sole Trader, not a business: the minute I start thinking about taking on paid contributors, ad sales, that kind of thing, them I'm going to have to do what my accountant has been on at me to do for 20 years now and launch a limited company. Which sounds like a right pain in the rump. On the plus side, maybe five years from now it'll be such a success Hearst Media or someone'll buy it as a going concern and I can retire on a bed stuffed with fifty quid notes. (Hey, a guy can dream.)

One thing's for sure, if I did launch a weekly...



...I probably wouldn't put scantily-clad dollybirds on the cover. Probably.

Promotion
Whether I launch a newsletter or a weekly, I'd still be responsible for promotion. Now, I used to have a decent number of followers on Twitter before Pedo Guy took over and I abandoned ship; now I've got... like, 1.5k on Masto. I've got thousands of readers on sites like Hackster, but no way to advertise the new publication to 'em.

A quick bit of research suggests the conversion rate from free to paid subscriptions is around five percent. If we assumed that half my Masto followers would subscribe for free (which feels very, very generous), five percent of that is... 38. Same source says around 70% of consumers would be willing to spend up to $10 a month, so if we price it at the very top end I'd be getting $380 a month - or £290 before tax. Which... ain't going to keep me in kippers, y'know?

So, promotion. I could pay for advertising, but I dunno how effective that'd be. I could try to get some column inches if I went the weekly route via sheer novelty. There's word-of-mouth, of course. Make the first few issues free for early subscribers. Maybe try to find someone to partner with: what was once the world's leading Apple magazine got there 'cos the EIC managed to convince Apple that it should include a free subscription in the box with every Macintosh it sold - instant audience.

There's also giveaways. I've a tonne of review hardware just cluttering up the shelves, some of which - Pi 500, Pi Monitor, Pi 500+ - is still in demand. I could run in-mag competitions, just like the weeklies, to encourage subscriptions. In doing so, of course, I'd have to be careful not to run afoul of the Gambling Act: I wouldn't have to register as a gaming provider so long as there's either a genuine element of skill involved (like HCW's word search, but not like the classic workarounds asking "which of the following is a type of cheese: cheddar, the moon, or an Aston Martin Vantage?" which clearly require zero skill at all) or there's a free route to entry. The traditional route for the latter, so as to avoid a flood of free entries, is to require a physical letter to be posted - acceptable to the Gambling Commission, but means I'd need a PO Box at about £45 a month for a proper Royal Mail one that'll forward to my home address.)

Other than that... I 'unno. The nice thing about writing for client outlets is that I don't have to think about these things: they handle promotion, ad sales, everything. I just write. Of course, that means they can keep the lion's share of revenue too: I've seen Hackster's rate card, and they charge an order of magnitude more for advertising than I ever saw 'em pay me.

The End
You either read all of that, in which case my apologies, or you skipped to the bottom. Either way, thoughts? Should I just carry on doing what I do, at the mercy of freelance budgets and client whims, or go it alone? Is there a market for a weekly-style publication delivered as a PDF, or should I just join the tens of thousands doing email newsletters?

 

It's broken?

...

Seems to be working for me. Hasn't been updated since August, but it's working.

 

I'd ideally like to avoid a staff role - I (usually) enjoy freelance life, and in particular a full-time newsroom gig would mean absolutely zero time to faff with newsletters or weeklies.

I'd still be taking on freelance work while doing either of the above, tho' - but that'd allow me the flexibility to ramp my workload as required.

And, like you say, there's contractual issues. Even if the contract allows for external work (which it'd have to, or I wouldn't sign) there's a very good chance I'd end up covering the most interesting stories in the staff role leaving any newsletter very thin indeed.

 

Absolutely zero "AI" tools would be used for any of this. Not a one. Ever. I'd rather give the whole career up and go flip burgers, at least there's honour in that.

Funnily enough, while doing my surface-level research, it turns out you're bucking a trend: short-form video content, which was The Future only a few years ago, is trending downwards, while newsletters are up 700% or something stupid.

 

Ah, my other website. I haven't tried accessing that in a while! Ta, I'll go poke WordPress and see what its problem is.

EDIT:
Fixed! Must have broken when I upgraded PHP, though why only one site broke and not the other I don't know - they're both the same WordPress version, just different themes.

EDIT EDIT:
Broken again! Or maybe not, it might just be cached... let me log into the CDN...

EDIT EDIT EDIT:
No, it's not a caching problem, it's broken. I got an email three minutes ago saying it had upgraded to WordPress 6.8.3, and in doing so must have broken itself again. Le sigh.

EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT:
Yup, the upgrade had undone the change I made to class-wp-widget-factory.php, which broke the site again. Now, does that mean it's going to break every time there's a new WordPress version? 'cos that'd get annoying quick...

EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT:
There we go, apparently an old plugin - AJAX Calendar - hasn't been updated for PHP 8.2 and higher and was killing the site. Disabled that, undid my core-file modification: site's fine. That also explains why freelance. wasn't broken: I don't have that plugin installed over there.

 

<shudder>

The good news is: I remember how to use Scribus!

Kinda. Took a bit of DuckDuckGoing, but I got there in the end. Original first, repro second.





Only the vaguest of attempts at font-matching was made. The body text is Liberation Serif, the sans-serif stuff is Inter 'cos that's one of the few I've got with a decent set of weights beyond normal and bold (but even at "Black," it's not as heavy as the original.) The advert's just a straight image lift, I wasn't going to faff around trying to reproduce that.

But there it is: proof that I can create something equivalent to Home Computing Weekly using nobbut Scribus.

 

I reached out back when Custom PC closed, to see if they wanted Hobby Tech as a ten-year-strong going concern: radio silence. (I've had plenty of stuff in there over the years as one-offs, though - even did a group test of mini-PCs.)

Eh, sadly publishers aren't as generous as you think: the contract lets 'em syndicate your articles, and you get no additional cash when they appear in foreign outlets. (The same thing used to happen with my Custom PC stuff, which appeared in Maximum PC or whatever it was called.)

 

Been doing some more Scribus playing, and I have run into a pretty sizeable speedbump: it's crap on toast for accessibility. Text in the exported PDF flows weirdly - even if you make linked text frames rather than a single frame with multiple columns - which will break screen readers, and there's zero support for adding alt-text to imagery.

Kinda pours cold water on the plan, that. I *could* offer something like Markdown or even plain text for those who need it, but I'd prefer a single thing accessible to all - which is, I guess, email or web rather than PDF. Boo-hiss.

 

Having a play around with Medium for the first time in years, by dusting off a 2012 article I originally had published in the much-missed Micro Mart: The Printer Ink Wars. Amazingly, absolutely nothing has changed in the 13 years since - except now I'd probably use HP rather than Lexmark as the most egregious printer company.

Paywalled members link:
https://medium.com/@ghalfacree/the-printer-ink-wars-a62ce9a8c7c4

Unpaywalled friends link:
https://medium.com/@ghalfacree/the-printer-ink-wars-a62ce9a8c7c4?sk=ebd3256b2283289d11f468192985b663

Medium doesn't seem to have changed much either. The text editor's still weird, and you still can't earn jack all unless you put it behind the paywall as a "member's only" story - if you click the friends link above it doesn't count, even if you're a Medium member. Which seems a bit mean, really. (I have no idea what happens if you're a Medium member and you click the friends link, close the tab, then click the paywalled link...)