How to Start a Digital Magazine

You can pop over to ChatGPT right now and ask the same question, but AI can only look at what has previously existed in order to form its answers, and frankly, what has existed on the Internet isn’t all that useful.

Define your niche, it will tell you, do market research, create a business plan, choose a platform, assemble a team...yawn.

Sorry, but when you feed AI nothing but content written for SEO by folks on Fiverr, you get AI content that looks like it was poorly written for SEO by folks on Fiverr.

Practically speaking, that’s not useful.

Define your niche? Presumably, if you’re searching for anything related to publishing a digital magazine app, you already have a topic in mind. Telling you to do something you’ve already done sorta’ misses the mark, but there’s something to consider there.

Not all topics work for magazine publishing, and digital publishing adds new considerations not seen in print.

Let’s look at three topics:

Fashion

Formula One

Freelance Writing

At first glance, one of these is terrible.

There are ten million fashion magazines, so obviously that’s the best, and racing is a big money industry. Freelance writing is of interest to exactly zero people, right?

Wrong. Anyone who makes a living or wants to make a living in writing is a potential reader of freelance writing content. Your magazine can bring value to those people, and they’ll pay you for it.

Fashion is huge. There is no disputing that, and there are millions of F-1 fans, but it will not surprise you that fashion trends come and go. Also, Takuma Sato no longer drives for Honda.

Sato and acid wash jeans are transitory topics. They’re here today and gone tomorrow.

They are now topics. The current issue of any fashion or racing magazine is relevant the day it’s published, and that’s about it, whereas topics like ‘how to attract and keep writing clients’ are evergreen. And that matters in digital publishing, because digital back issues sell.

Read that last line again. Entire back catalogs have value in digital, but only if the content is still relevant.

There is no warehouse shipping out 1983 issues of SPIN and Vogue. That’s not a thing, but back issues of digital magazines sell every day, for full cover price, so evergreen content matters a lot. ChatGPT doesn’t know that – has no idea.

Practically speaking, a checklist for starting a digital magazine app should start somewhere after the idea phase, after all the AI generated listicles have already been covered. You’ve already had the idea, and provided it’s a good one, you’re ready for next steps.