A friend of mine is keen to start a magazine that she believes will appeal strongly to a specialist audience.
To test the waters she would like to put together a small run of maybe 1,000 copies that she can distribute locally before going out and seeking bigger advertising commitments and perhaps shooting for a distribution agreement.
I’ve had some experience in outsourcing larger runs of magazines (50,000 copies or so) but am unsure of the best and most cost efficient means of producing smaller production runs.
What sort of printing process should we be looking at?
“Digital offset” from something like an HP Indigo or a Heidelberg Quickmaster DI might be a good way to go. Decent quality, reasonable prices for short runs.
I’ve had good luck with local printers that do newspapers. A magazine like this probably does not have strict timing to meet, so they can schedule it around the time when they are printing newspapers, at times when their presses would otherwise be empty. If you tell them 'I will deliver it to you on this date, and I want the completed print job 15 days later, that gives them a lot of flexibility, and they will often give you a very good price.
Good feedback - thanks everyone for your thoughts. Re Filling Pages’ question - the closer to a traditional glossy look and feel, the better. Saddle stitch will be the binding in the short term, paper weight currently unknown. But digital offset sounds the goods.