My head is in a tizzy, as research into print options has scrambled all the gray cells into jelly. It’s a wonder my fingers can still press keys; must be muscle memory!
Lulu.com forever, expensive as that is, or actual printing, with all of the risks and peril that entails? In this electronic age, are people satisfied with PDF files and the occasional home-printed page, or is there really demand for an actual printed magazine at all? If we go with batch printing, how many do we print? The more we print, the less the price-per-unit, but the overall amount we must pay skyrockets. Spending thousands of dollars only to end up with a garage full of undistributed magazines doesn’t sound appealing, obviously.
Then again, Lulu.com is the main reason we kept this first issue at 20 pages, in some cases squeezing what should have properly been a two-page spread into a single page, and leaving out several things that are now trickling onto the website. (A nice variation on the Nature Journal is due in the next day or two, so check back!) Going with a “real” print process would give us a bit more flexibility on the number of pages, too, so long as we stayed evenly divisible by four.
I paged through some magazines last night, counting pages. Huge magazines, with page numbers in the multiple hundreds, were more than 50% advertising. Of the non-advertising pages, an amazing — truly astounding — number of them were “wasted” with full-page photos and three words of text, or two (2!) pages of a table of contents, and so on. Our recipes done according to that style would take at least three pages each. At least! I suspect the multitude of pages was intentional, to sell yet more advertising. One wonders, with all of that advertising, why they can’t afford to give the magazine away for free! We have no advertising, so we don’t need to space things out quite so much. And yet 20 pages does seem a bit slender. It’s the equivalent of 60 pages of some popular magazines, in my opinion, but one only realizes that after sitting down and spending time with it.
My head hurts, so I’m taking the evening off and going to a concert. Tomorrow night, too, oddly enough. I’ll get a year’s worth of concerts in two nights! (It’s the multiple concerts that might push the Nature Journal project post to the weekend.)
As always, we covet your input. Are you interested in a print edition of Seasonal Delights, or would you rather stick with the PDF edition? Should we make it larger, or keep it the same size? Keep in mind that more pages does tend to mean higher costs associated with printing, especially with Lulu.com. Any other thoughts related to printing? Either comment here, or email us using the name ‘kelli’ followed by the usual at symbol and then see the next paragraph.
Follow that name and symbol with this domain: sdquarterly.com to make the full email address. Sorry for the extended and odd description, but this is a public post, and spam-harvesters are quite clever these days. 
- Phillip
