Aloha! I’m Phillip, and I’m taking over this blog.

Well, okay, strictly speaking, I’ve been writing almost every post all along, but I’ve always done so from the standpoint of the editorial “we.” No longer! Now I write as “Phillip,” and Kelli shouldn’t be blamed for anything I say.

So here’s the straight scoop on things related to printing, the stuff you might never hear from any editorial “we.”

The print editions just announced? They’re expensive. We know that, for sure. The problem is simply this: printing small batches of anything is expensive. If we could be sure that a few hundred people would pay for a print edition, we could use a real printer instead of Lulu.com, and deliver the magazine much, much, much more cheaply.

Let’s consider a hypothetical scenario in which we use PrintPelican.com for magazine printing. They’ve got a handy calculator, which makes things easy, and they’re highly recommended by some folks we’ve talked to since launching Seasonal Delights. If we check the price on a 48-page full-color magazine, which is what’s available from Lulu.com right now, the default batch size of 25 issues is $656.32, or $26.25 per issue, before we even mail it out! That’s just the price to get it to our house, where it doesn’t do any of you much good. Add in mailing service, and the price jumps to $33.44 per issue!

Suddenly the $13.95 price for subscribers doesn’t look too bad, eh?

To get the PrintPelican price down to Lulu levels (I love saying that aloud!), we have to order at least 75 copies of each issue, and that still means that we’re working for free, since that doesn’t allow for any profit whatsoever. I’ll talk more next week about working for free, but for now I’ll just say that doesn’t work forever. Besides, just meeting the Lulu price is pointless. Lulu does a good job, and if all we can do is match the Lulu price, we’ll stay with Lulu! Realistically, to lower the price of print issues, we would need to have more than 100 paid print subscribers. In fact, I worked on this math quite some time ago, and I think we actually realized at the time that to make this work, we would really need something like 300 paid subscribers. Something like that.

All I can say is, yes, the Lulu.com print editions aren’t as cheap as I would like them to be. That said, I think they’re worth it. Seriously, they’re beautiful, and sturdy, and there’s nothing quite like holding a physical magazine in your hand. In the future, we may try to come up with a cheaper option, but for now I only hope that the Lulu.com price compares favorably with replacing a few inkjet cartridges every time you try to print all 46 pages in color.

P.S. I hope the links I provided in that last post work for you. A lot of things on the site really depend on you being: (1) a subscriber, and (2) logged in. Most of the tech support emails I get have to do with (2). I’ve tried to make it more clear by explicitly stating in the sidebar either “You are logged in” or “You are not logged in.” I hope that helps, but I know a couple of things about the site can still be confusing. If you click on those print-edition links and don’t see the price you’re expecting, come back to the blog and check that sidebar again! Thanks.

- Phillip