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While media conglomerates closed the door on their print divisions, independent publishers have quietly built successful businesses around physical magazines and journals. These are not past things holding on to redundant models, but wise new business folk who saw a trend that everyone else overlooked.
Independent publishers offer pages you can fold and covers you can frame, something the internet can never duplicate. These are readings that end, rather than making readers open ten more browser tabs.
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Screen fatigue has become a major issue for people who spend eight hours staring at monitors. Most people don’t want to scroll through so much content at home. Readers yearned for the physical, something that didn’t buzz with notifications every five minutes. It is independent publishers who are changing this a bit.
Still, a recent study showed that “Print is still the most trusted type of ad”. It was a credibility gap that turned to gold for indie creators who predicated their brands on authenticity. Small publishers made their smallness an asset that they could take risks that no one would have to explain on a call with shareholders.
The cost of printing has plummeted over the last years. Digital printing made it possible to avoid the boom-or-bust production of big print runs and crossed fingers. Today, niche creators are publishing magazines for a smaller audience of collectors who prefer curated content to the endless scroll.
Services such as HelloPrint made small-batch production feasible for a low cost. Publishers can order just what they need, try out different formats and react fast based on actual rather than projected sales data. This flexibility allows creators to focus on the quality of their content without having constant inventory anxiety.
Social media could be good marketing. Small publishers can share their style and message for nothing on Instagram and TikTok. Even a brief video behind the scenes of how a print magazine is created can rack up thousands of views — and convert followers into paying readers. The algorithm is somewhat partial to such real behind-the-scenes moments like that, which small creators can all too easily provide and big media often cannot.
Independent publishers developed direct relationships with niche bookshops, coffee shops, and boutique retailers that shared their values. A newsstand magazine about sustainable fashion is going to do better at an eco-friendly boutique than a chain drugstore.
Additionally, sites like Shopify and Squarespace democratized e-commerce for non-techies. Publishers could take the books direct to consumers around the world, preserving profit margins while calling creative shots. HelloPrint’s easy ordering process also provided production infrastructure so that even individual creatives could manage the logistics of production, while working with a team.
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Digital saturation has created the opening for independent publishers. Independent publishers filled it with craft, community and content worth keeping. They demonstrated that “old media” was not dying but transmuting into something more methodical. Today’s successful publishers are not competing with the internet. What they’re offering is something the internet cannot recreate: physical presence in an ever more virtual world.
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