Newspaper Club

We started Newspaper Club a year ago. What have we learned?

Do something interesting and people will give you awards and write about you. That’s the marketing strategy.

The slog is longer and sloggier than we could ever have known. It’s truly true that the ideas are the easy bit. The hard bit is fixing all the details, tidying up the edges, building, then rebuilding, then rebuilding again. Hitting a deadline, then the next one, then the next one. (Fortunately it’s made worthwhile by the papers that people make. That’s been the most satisfying thing – the lovely papers people have made.)

It helps a lot to have some pictures. We got pictures of papers properly shot by a proper photographer. It makes a difference.

ARTHR isn’t just a means to an end, it’s a marvellous invention that’s genuinely made new things possible – and we could do more with it than just newspapers.

The internet makes lots of things easier, but as soon as you have customers you’re dealing with people. And people have strange questions, interesting ideas and unpredictable problems. So you need someone nice to talk to them. Similarly, you end up talking to people at other businesses and they need someone who speaks their language. So getting Gary and Anne on board was a very good idea.

We’ve been incredibly lucky. If we succeed in any way it won’t be because of hard work and talent it’ll be because we were lucky. We’re lucky to have generous friends who’ve helped us a lot, we’re lucky to have met just the right backers early on. We’re lucky to have enthusiastic and understanding customers. Many other people could have done this, there’s nothing special about us. We’ve met quite a few start-up people in this process, the best ones seem to recognise the importance of luck and have read The Black Swan, the worst ones seem to think it was all down to them. We’d beg to differ. Making something that people want to buy and selling it to them for a more than it costs to make. That seems to be a good basis for a business. More internet businesses should try that. It means that we’ve been making cash since Week One. Actual cash money. Multiples of thousands of pounds. That’s helpful.

We don’t explain ourselves well enough. Lots of the bits of the business are obvious to us, because we’re involved every day. So we get surprised when people ask how many pages there are in a 12-page newspaper, but it’s not necessarily obvious. We’re going to be rolling more explanations out on the site. Give people more help. Explain the process differences between black and white and colour more clearly. All that.

And, overall, we’re glad we started. We’re not at a point, yet, where we can retire and live off Newspaper Club, but we’ve put it in the world and it works. If we all fell under a bus it would still work, still keep going and people would get to make their own newspapers. That’s a nice feeling.

We use two different processes for printing newspapers. One is basically a big laser printer – it lets us print small quantities of papers, we use it for runs of 5 to 500 papers. It can only print in black and white. The other is a regular, big, standard newspaper printer – like regular newspapers use. This can print in colour or black and white but only in quantities of 500 or more.

The first process is fantastic for lots of reasons – small runs, quickness, cheapness – but we’ve been starting to hear from customers who aren’t happy with the quality of the reproduction, particularly for large areas of dense black ink. This is obviously hugely disappointing for everyone. And it’s a tricky area to deal with. We’ve refunded everyone who’s unhappy and reprinted papers in those instances where we think we can get a better result. But, to some extent, less than perfect reproduction is inherent in the process. We think, for the papers we’ve done ourselves, that if you design with this in mind and understand what you’re going to get that it’s still a really good product. But we know that’s not a really acceptable answer and we hate letting people down like this.

It’s also worth acknowledging that unhappiness with this process has gone up recently. It’s possible that the printer we’re using is delivering below expectations for even this process. We’re looking into that. If that is the case then that’s clearly completely unacceptable and we’ll have to stop printing those shorter runs until the backup plan’s in place. (We are working very hard on a backup plan.)

So, things we’ve been thinking about and doing:

It’s obvious that we need to be clearer about the sort of result you can expect to get, so we’ve put a handy guide on the site.

We’re working on finding better solutions so this won’t even be an issue.

We’re making a sample paper that will illustrate best and worst case scenarios. That’ll be available for everyone who wants one.

If we think of anything else we’ll let you know.

Also, please note, lots of people are very happy with the papers they get from this process, so that’s good, and the second, more conventional process has never had any complaints, so hurrah.

Back in the early days, when we had no idea whether this was a good idea or not, we took a lot of comfort from the nice things that Jeremy at magCulture said about us. He seemed to like what we were doing and he knows a lot about publishing.

So we were really delighted when Jeremy used us to make a 4th Anniversay Best of magCulture Paper. And even more delighted that it’s for sale. We really like it when we can help create something that people can sell, it’d be brilliant if we could become a platform for other little businesses.

Anyway – you can get a copy of the magCulture here, and you should. It’s only £4 in the UK. (£5 for Europe, £7 for the rest of the world.)

(pictures from magCulture, hope that’s OK)

Our friends at BERG launched Schooloscope this week. It’s a lovely piece of work, sweeping up all sorts of impenetrable data about schools and making it glanceable, readable and accessible. You can tell they’ve really worked hard on the details and, having glanced over their shoulders a little while they’ve been making it, we can attest to how they’ve worked to turn inherently judgmental and binary data into something fair and nuanced. Schooloscope’s perspective is that of someone neutral and informed, it’s therefore a brilliant tool for comparing schools, for exploring a terrain that’s completely baffling to many parents. It’s a superbly intelligent platform for data.

If you’re already connected to a school though, the portrait they offer of your school probably won’t feel adequate. Deliberately neutral government data will never do justice to what someone involved with a school feels about that particular school. All of which struck me because we’ve just printed a newspaper for All Souls School in Westminster – an unashamedly un-neutral paper celebrating all that’s good about the school – aimed at recruiting more kids and parents.

It’s a lovely piece of work and made me realise that Newspaper Club is a platform too and perhaps an especially good platform for people with particular points of view. (More pictures)

And, it should be noted, both platforms are supported by 4iP.

It’s all hands to the pump for the team at South by South West Interactive at the moment. We’ve carved out some space in a hidden away enclave in the Austin Conference Centre to work on our free gift for attendees of the Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media Design panel on Tuesday at 3:30pm in Hilton H.

There will be maps! There will be infographics! There will be writing from people you’ve heard of! There will be games to play! But we’ve got 20 minutes until our deadline, so it’s time to get back to it. If you’re around, we’d love to see you there.

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.