As I said, this magazine is wonderful. One caution I have, taking what you said that you only intend to charge for prints, is that I don’t think it’s a great idea to self-devalue the PDF version by not charging for it as well.
1. Visit the site and get it free.
2. Subscribe, get the PDF delivered to your inbox and discount on printed version.
That way, you give folks an easy on-ramp to paying you while still giving out the free version.
What you're saying makes sense and it's a good idea. It's not fully directly applicable to Paged Out! though due to certain assumptions we've made with our base operating model.
I.e. our intention is to charge readers neither for PDF nor for print, to the extent that is possible. In case of print-on-demand or print-subscription that of course won't be possible, but at various events we're successfully bringing printed Paged Out! issues to distribute for free. The idea is rather for the zine to finance itself through ad sales, sponsorship editions, and special collector bundled editions. We have a couple of other more-typical ideas as well, like Pateron later on.
Admittedly, so far we're in the red (not terribly though), but that's OK. There are still certain things we need to roll out before being able to evaluate whether we need to change the base operating model. If we do have to change it, it's not unlikely to start with ideas like the one you proposed - they do make sense.
As I said, this magazine is wonderful. One caution I have, taking what you said that you only intend to charge for prints, is that I don’t think it’s a great idea to self-devalue the PDF version by not charging for it as well.
1. Visit the site and get it free. 2. Subscribe, get the PDF delivered to your inbox and discount on printed version.
That way, you give folks an easy on-ramp to paying you while still giving out the free version.