Newspaper Club

The Engineering Dept. went to the Design Museum in London last night, for the opening of the Designs of the Year exhibition. That’s because we’ve been nominated in the Graphics category, which is nice.

The blurb says:

The seemingly unstoppable rise of digital communication has seen many people predict the impending death of print. The Newspaper Club flies in the face of this, by enabling anyone to produce, not just their own newspaper, but anything that can be made with ink on newsprint. To keep costs as low as possible on print runs from five to 5000, The Newspaper Club utilises downtime at printing presses. Files can be uploaded to the website, enabling prompt printing and delivery, and there are even tools to help the enthusiastic amateur arrange text and images in attractive page layouts.

We’ve been given a little space in which to show off Newspaper Club, and we wanted to make something friendly and interesting that people could actually do something with. So we printed lots of single sheet newspapers that people could take away with them.

On one side, a big logo. That’s not very interesting. But on the other side, James Bridle produced a map and an essay for a walk starting at the Design Museum. It’s called A Wide Arm of Sea. The walk takes you east along an imaginary shore line, towards the history of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe. As James writes:

Somewhere along the way I had the realisation that Bermondsey and Rotherhithe form not a riverbank, but a coastline: a starting point for voyages and expeditions, a strand of possibilities. All the world embarked from this point: Conrad’s famous opening lines to Heart of Darkness – “What greatness had not floated on that ebb into the mystery of an unknown earth!” – look out from here; as do the mad expeditions of Brunel and Captain (Saint?) Christopher Jones. And so: we have a walk, a story, a history.

James has written all about it on his blog booktwo.org, so to save me just copying and pasting, go and read it over there. It’s a fine thing indeed.

A Wide Arm of Sea is available at the Design Museum for the next couple of months. If you follow the walk, we’d love to hear your stories and see your photos – stick a link in the comments.

As usual, more photos on Flickr.

James Bridle was the first person to print something with the beta version of Newspaper Club. And now, a couple of days later, his newspaper is on sale. It’s a clever and beautiful thing and you should consider getting one of the limited edition of 100. It’s very special.

It’s all very exciting, feels like we’re properly under way now.

Right, after lots of thinking, pondering, wondering, adjusting, spreadsheeting, negotiating and absolutely no consumer research we think we’ve got our price list sorted out.

These prices include VAT and delivery to any UK mainland address, except the Scottish Highlands. (To be honest I’m not quite sure what that bit about the Scottish Highlands means. Do we not deliver there at all? Or does it cost more? Neither seems very satisfactory. I’ll check.)

You get a 12-page tabloid size newspaper. Quantities from 5 to 300 are in black and white. Quantities from 500 up are colour. For ease of comparison we’ve also included what you’ll be paying per copy.

So here are the costs for black and white:

5 copies              £35       (£7 per copy)

20 copies           £70       (£3.50 per copy)

50 copies           £90       (£1.80 per copy)

100 copies         £120     (£1.20 per copy)

300 copies         £330    (£1.10 per copy)

And here are the costs for colour:

500 copies        £500     (£1 per copy)

1,000 copies     £900     (£0.90 per copy)

2,000 copies    £1,200   (£0.60 per copy)

5,000 copies    £1,500   (£0.30 per copy)

(More than that, get in touch and we’ll work something out)

As you can see, the more you do, the cheaper, per copy, it gets. These prices apply when you upload a pdf and we organise printing for you, or when you use ARTHR (our online layout tool that’ll help you design your paper.)

We think these prices make our services affordable for everyone who we might be interested. We hope so.

In other news, we’ve almost got all the legal stuff sorted out. We’re doing the last bit of alpha testing. We should be able to open the beta in the next few weeks.

UPDATE: International Shipping

Well, so far, prices seem to be OK with people but lots of you are asking about International Shipping. Erk. There’s no easy solution to this I’m afraid. Newspapers are heavy, physical things and shipping them around the world is going to cost money and carbon. Our eventual aim is to find enough printers around the globe that we won’t have to ship internationally, there’ll be a printer near you somewhere. In the medium-term we will be up for printing in the UK and shipping to you – but we can’t yet tell you how much it’ll be. Probably, on day one of the beta, it’ll be UK only. Sorry. We’ll get to the Rest Of The World as soon as possible. Huge thanks for your interest though.

A lot of glory in any start-up tends to go to the designers and engineers, they make the visible stuff, the stuff that gets written about, the stuff that wins awards. But the success of any start-up is really down to the people treading the streets, getting toes in door, getting in-your-face-time with wavering clients and Making A Sale – the Sales People. The newspaper we made with Folksy is a great example of this unsung art in operation. James has done us the favour of letting us peek inside the conversation:

The first rule of the patented Newspaper Club Always Be Selling Process (TM) – Positivity and Pith! There are two words here and they’re both positive. This is textbook.

I don’t believe this bit of the conversation actually happened, a Top-Class Sales Person (TM) wouldn’t use a word like hindsight because it fails two rules of Hard Sales Language – No Soft Vowels and No Long Words. Anyway.

And here’s The Close. Observe the Textbook use of monosyllabic words and strict adherence to ABCIFTK principles (Always Be Coming In For The Kill).

This is how a start-up gets started-up. Sales. Hard-nosed, hard-faced, leave-nothing-on-the-table, get-your-tanks-on-their-lawn salespersonship. Let’s not forget that.

Seriously though. Big thanks to all the folksy folk. This is a lovely project, we’re very glad to help. More pictures will follow shortly.

We’ve not posted much recently have we? It’s because we’ve been biting our nails and watching the internets.* In the middle of last week we sent beta invites to about twenty of our friends giving them access to Newspaper Club and our proprietary ARTHR system.

We’re fortunate enough to know people who know loads about UI, websites etc – they’ve been giving us splendid feedback. We’re also fortunate to know people who know bugger all about that sort of stuff – they’ve been giving us equally valuable feedback. Next week we’re going to incorporate their thoughts, then, with just a few legal and PayPal hurdles to clear we should be able to share it with more of you.

In the meantime we’re still angling for some decent chairs if anyone’s got any going spare. The picture above should indicate the direness of our need.

*Not really. Ben’s gone to the US for holidays, Tom’s cycling round town looking for good kiting spots, Russell’s trying to convince MPs we’re a good thing.

You’ll be pleased to know that after our Investor Crisis midweek our shiny new Skype headsets arrived yesterday. They’re very nice and they came in a clever little postbox friendly cardboard box.

This morning I thought I’d try Skyping the rest of the team.

I tried Engineering first. No answer. I don’t think they were awake yet.

I tried Sales & Marketing next. No answer. I think they’d gone out for breakfast. They often do that.

Anyway, the headsets are splendid and this has got us wondering if anyone else would like to donate to a teeny start up. We’re particularly after some Aeron chairs right now.

In other news, we’re printed some more newspapers which I’ll blog about later and we’re fine tuning the design of key pages. We’re also getting ready for a very quiet, very private, very Beta launch next week. We’re going to test the site on a handful of people and if that goes well we’ll release the Beta to rest of the 2,000 people currently on our signup list.

(I’m not sure if “release the Beta” is recognised terminology. I was going to ask Engineering but they weren’t awake.)

We like 4ip. We like that they mock us and we mock them. We don’t think this is the normal investor/start-up relationship. For instance, we had this conversation yesterday (start from the top and read down). Apologies to anyone who thought we were really having a relationship crisis. Though I notice no-one came forward with offers of alternative funding. (Maybe because we take the piss out of our investors.)

Oh, and big thanks to Skype for the headsets. Very kind.

In other news, we’re very close to beta.

Remaining issues – paypal have to send us a letter with a secret code in it. We need to determine our VAT status before we can tell you our prices. We need Ts & Cs and Terms of Trade, so we need to have more meetings with lawyers.

Nearing beta now. Engineering frustrated with PayPal. PayPal convinced we’re fraudsters. Sales & Marketing writing copy. Art redesigning pages. Many enquiries coming in. Phone calls. VAT returns. Emails. More forms. Raised voices. Icons. Meetings. Specs. Meetings. Plans.

Soon, very soon.

We’ve been waiting for more pictures before writing about this. But I don’t want to let another day slip by, so I’m going to mention it now and we can add more pictures when they arrive.

One of the things we hoped for when we started this foolish quest would be that people would think of things to do with Newspaper Club that we couldn’t have imagined ourselves. 2Halves is a perfect example. It’s a special one-off newspaper, written by Spurs and Arsenal bloggers, 3,500 copies were printed yesterday morning in anticipation of the latest North London Derby and handed out to fans before the game. It’s a lovely looking thing, produced by our friends at The Rebel Alliance, and, if you missed it, you can download a pdf at their website. (Or, if you’re quick request a printed copy.)

As I say, more pictures when we get them. But, in the meantime, congrats to The Rebel Alliance for a splendid idea – which will hopefully inspire others to do something similar.

We had a Status Meeting this morning.

Everything is going well. All on target. Engineering ensure us a beta launch is “geologically imminent”.

We also had to fill in an Investor Status Report which made us realise we’re only £500 away from reaching 50% of our revenue target. That’s got to be good, especially pre-launch. Pre-lunch in fact, as Engineering have just popped out for a sandwich.

Matt is also doing a splendid job on the Guide To Newspaper Club he’s putting together. Today he presented us a glorious flat plan. On a flip chart.

Made a nice change from all the PowerPoint Sales and Marketing put us through.