John has asked a good question down there in the comments.
“Are black and white print runs limited to 300 or do they revert to colour prices above 300?”
Short answer: They revert to colour prices above 500.
Prices
Wednesday, January 6th 2010
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.
Clackity, clackity, clack
Wednesday, December 23rd 2009
One of the things we’ve had in the back of our minds whilst building the Newspaper Club site, is that we want to honour the traditions and aethetic of newspaper production and distribution, but without pastiching or somehow sucking up to it.
Some of our inspiration has come from visiting the printing presses, which have changed relatively little in the last couple of decades. (You can see some photos from our previous visits in Flickr.) But the news-gathering, design and layout process has changed hugely, and it’s a bit of shame that it’s something that we can’t experience first hand anymore.
But still, there are some lovely pieces of footage. A friend watched Absence of Malice the other day, a 1981 film by Sydney Pollack, starring Paul Newman. And whilst watching the opening sequence he thought of us.
Clackity ticker-tape machines! Teletypes! Nasty chemicals! Lots of beeping! If we can evoke just the smallest bit of this feeling, then I’ll be a happy man indeed.
Merry Christmas from the Engineering Dept!
Note to the Sales & Marketing Dept: site does not include repetitive beeping noises.
The Last newspaper of the year
Monday, December 21st 2009
Last FM recently published their celebrated end of year Top 40 as a newspaper using our PDF upload option.
They printed a paper for London and a paper for New York and included some local data visualisations based on listening in those cities.
It looks gorgeous and it feels like another way of getting online data into print.
More details here including one you can download.
We’re grateful to Last for providing us with a suitable end of year headline as we’re now shut for Christmas. We’ve had lots of enquiries over the last few weeks from people who are very excited about making their own newspapers, so it’s only fair that we update you on our launch progress.
We’re currently in a very private beta. This means we have a few select people testing the site and we’re learning and rebuilding as we go along. As you will have noticed we are printing newspapers but only a few and only really ones we feel demonstrate the flexibility of Newspaper Club. We’re not open for business just yet.
We’re planning a public beta end of Jan / start of Feb when you will be able to make a newspaper.
The best place to hear all the Newspaper Club launch news is right here.
Until next year have a very Merry Christmas from Art, Engineering and Sales & Marketing.
Occasionally smug
Sunday, December 20th 2009
Depending upon which device you are reading this, over there on the right we claim that this blog will be where “we’re alarmingly honest about where it’s all going wrong. And occasionally smug about where it’s going right.” At the moment our PR strategy appears to be “going right”.
We were featured in December’s Creative Review in a piece about the best magazines and newspapers of the year. Jeremy Leslie from MagCluture described us as “a pointer to the future of publishing content”.
Paul Brazier, the D&AD President (that’s a big deal for the design team) picked us as his Design of the Year in Design Week’s review of 2009. In particular he highlighted the corporate newspaper we did for Penguin.
Gordon Brown mentioned us that speech he gave which set all the data free. He referenced the Postcode Paper when describing the great things free data could achieve.
“All of this will be available for free commercial re-use, enabling people for the first time to take the material and easily turn it into applications, like fix my street or the Postcode Paper.”
That created all sort of interest including this mention inside the Financial Times. Which in turn impressed my father-in-law.
Not bad for a small start up.
Folksy – a Sales & Marketing Triumph
Wednesday, December 2nd 2009
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.
It’s all gone quiet over here
Thursday, November 26th 2009
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.
Paper Science
Wednesday, November 18th 2009
Last night we sent a newspaper to print for We Are Words + Pictures.
Produced in time for the Thought Bubble comic festival in Leeds, the newspaper is a sampler of the kind of work that We Are Words + Pictures stock at their occasional market stall.
It’s filled with illustrations, short stories, poetry, photography… anything really. The brief was that contributors had to submit something a little different to their regular output, all drawn together into a 12 page, full colour mini-anthology.
Contributions by Tom Humberstone, Dan Hancox and Matt Jones.
500 copies were printed in all, 300 of which will be available this weekend for just £1. Any remaining issues they’ll be offering for sale at their website www.wearewordsandpictures.com
Back cover by Adam Cadwell.
Gym Class Magazine
Monday, November 16th 2009
Last week we printed the fourth edition of Gym Class Magazine.
That’s what 200 black and white copies looks like.
I’ll let Steve tell you about the publication,
“Gym Class Magazine is a zine for the guy chosen last. What does that mean? Well, it’s a zine for the underdog, the black sheep. Remember your high school gym class? The bit where two kids were made captain and took turns choosing who they wanted on their team? Well, Gym Class Magazine is a zine for the guy chosen last.
It’s for geeks, nerds and nellys; definitely not for guys into dodgeball. Instead, we like more creative stuff… like drawing and illustration, indie magazines and comics, scary movies and sci-fi, graphic design and typography, electronic music and tall buildings.”
Great centrefold from the brilliant Andy Gilmore.
This is the first newspaper we’ve printed that you can buy. Click here to get a copy for £3, including UK postage. Worldwide postage is available. But be quick, there’s only 200.
More pics on Flickr.
All Donations Gratefully Received
Saturday, November 14th 2009
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.)