offline mag compliment

Your best bet is to find a local printer and negotiate a good rate. I ran an offline mag here in the U.S. several years ago and used printpelican.com, but I doubt their reach extends to Asia. Here are the steps I used to determine advertising rates:

1. How many pages will the magazine be and how many copies do I want to distribute? This determines printing costs.
2. How many ads do I want to place in the magazine?
3. How much do I want to earn? This determines the per ad cost.

I distributed the magazines for free. In your case you'd want to place free copies in hotels, restaurants, bars, cafes, souvenir shops, etc.

It's more expensive to produce a color, glossy magazine than it is black and white, but if you're also looking to get some web design business from your potential advertisers it could be worth the added expense to go color/glossy.

It's possible to line up your advertisers and distribution before spending a dime on printing the mag, that way you could do it without being out of pocket for more than your daily expenses. If your mag has articles and photos of the area you also have an opportunity to start an online mag promoting the area to tourists.

This could be a one-off endeavor for you or it could be a career, it just depends on your interest.

Will

Excellent idea and the advertising 'could' be very profitable.

To do it right you need to plan it out with regard to ad sales, content (editorial and volume of ads), design, printing and distribution.

Before you can create your ad specs and rates you must know your hard costs and always get different estimates including for different page counts and runs so you can have some flexibility in the event you want to do more pages or more ads.

Rule of thumb on ad rates:
Cover - #1 premium and highest rate
Centerfold - 2rd
Back cover - 3nd unless you give wrap around
Inside Front Cover - 4th
Inside back cover - 5th
first right page (opposite inside front cover) - 6th
opposite inside back cover - 7th

full page
1/2 page
1/4 page
any other breakdowns like 1/8 page

for standard pages (non-premiums) the full page is less than any other page combo (meaning the more ads you place on a page the higher the ad revenue for the page)

Example:
fp = $1,000
hp = $600 (2 x = $1,200 per page)
1/4 = $350 (4 x = $1,400 per page)
1/8 = $200 (8 x = $1,600 per page)

And you NEED a contract, signed by every advertiser.

Good luck. It's a lot of work to set up but can be a fun and profitable project. After that it's rinse and repeat.

yeah, it's built on pre-selling advertising to pay for the whole thing plus and profit.

If it's your own publication then you have to line up your own distribution channels. How you know it is successful is by checking the distribution, how fast they're going and whether or not you are refilling if you set it up that way. Real estate agents one great distribution source in addition to many local areas hotels, travel offices, universities, major employers, etc.

You can easily ad online publishing in addition to print see mine at Leander Chamber Directory published by Destination Graphix

Get the software yourself or see if the printer will include it, many here include it now. It was a big upsell that I used. And you can add Google Analytics to it too.

Based on the sample prices I would price the centerfold at $3,000 because of it's location, not that it's 2 pages. If it's your publication you have flexibility on pricing and giving breaks to get ads sold. I usually kick off a publication with an early bird special of 10% if purchased by a certain date. This helps stimulate buzz, ad sales and generate some upfront operating cash, especially if you are paying a rep for ad sales.

I say, if you are willing to take the bite at first and do the ads for free on the first issue, then you can fill your publication with the most prestigious advertisers, then all the small business men will want to pay to advertise in your mag with the major guys at a reasonable price. you can make your "proto type" (initial issue) so glammed out that people want to buy into it.

Offering a free ad can create some major endorsements, who may not otherwise give you the time of day, and that are worth 10's or maybe 100's of thousands of dollars to you in the long run.

Edit: Maybe give them 30 days for free and then force a continuity payment after a certain period.

The most stable opportunities in my experience, have been the ones that require you to eat some cost and effort for a couple of months and give something away for free.

I personally would never recommend eating the cost of an advertising magazine for numerous reasons, even if you have money to burn. If the area is saturated and you're an unknown I could see doing a local treasure map featuring points of interest and giving away a few ad spots or deep discounts to launch it, but you need to increase frequency.

Why not take a look at Issuu - You Publish and see if that might be of something of interest? They've even got an format for mobile phones: http://issuu.com/mobile

We also have a superb local publication in our area that is published on a monthly basis. It is exceptionally well done; a great magazine dealing with local news, events and 'topics' and it has many top quality advertisers every month - some new, some regulars. The magazine is free for the taking - which is amazing. Every page is glossy print - it's truly a work of art in every possible way.

The magazine is also available online. You can check the publishers website and perhaps come up with some ideas and take it from there. (I think this publication is very similar to what you are considering, which is why I posted the links here.)

Ottawa Valley Living Magazine

You can check the advertising options and rates here:

http://ottawavalleyliving.ca/index.p...d=61&Itemid=48

Notice that the publisher also has a readable, online version. Here's a sample:

Ottawa Valley Living Lifestyle and Real Estate Magazine - Aug-10

The online version is hosted/published here: Mstand - read, share, compile (formerly mygazines.net)

Mygazines is owned byFlyp Technologies Inc. There is an article about the company here on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mygazines

All you need to get started after knowing your numbers is an ad order form with specs and rates and your sales letter. A cover design will help alot but it's not a deal breaker. Then hit the ad sales, that's where you're going to be until you generate enough revenue. If you do it all yourself you'll earn more.