Why do magazines a month, or more, early?

Factual Questions
21

Magazines exist for advertisers to have a way to get their ads into peoples’ hands. What, you thought they were about the articles? Wrong. If the ads stop, the magazine stops. (Same with newspapers and look at what’s happening to them.) The entire U.S. economy is geared to Christmas spending. Therefore you’d expect that magazines do as many articles as possible about Christmas to lure readers and get them to read the ads that keep the magazines in business.

You can be offended by supermarkets that start selling Halloween candy at the beginning of September, too, but it will never change. It works.

22

I subscribe to one magazine that has a different reason for publishing early. It has nothing to do with advertising seasons since ads in it are pretty much the same year around. They used to publish the typical month ahead (for the newsstand pull date), but some time back moved it to six weeks ahead.

The magazine is Sky & Telescope. The reason they publish early has to do with time sensitive material and international mail. Every issue has a bunch of stuff about what can be seen in the sky that month. It’s best if they can get each issue to their subscribers by the beginning of the month. However, for some countries it can take 6 weeks for magazines to reach there from the US. So they publish six weeks early. I usually get my copy with about a week left in the month.

23

I used to work for a professional association’s magazine, and sometimes people would complain that they didn’t get the October issue until it was already October. But there was nothing seasonal or time-sensitive about the contents; anything like a conference notice was published with adequate time to spare. So I would—teasingly, since they were members whose dues supported my salary—suggest that they just mark out October and write in November on the cover.

24

Former national magazine editor here.

It’s hard to wrap your head around it in these days of on-demand-everything and just-in-time supply chains, but it actually takes a long time to ship out all those magazines to all of your subscribers. At our magazine, we (well, another division of our company) had more than a million mailings to make every month. Just for US. Not to mention another 20 titles, plus everything going to newsstands. That takes time, any way you slice it. And so, the goal was always to make sure that the LAST subscriber to receive her magazine would get it by, at the latest, the first week of the month listed on the cover (hopefully, by the last week of the month before). (a) You don’t want people getting pissed. (b) One reason they get pissed is when they keep walking by newsstands, seeing the latest issue of the magazine to which they subscribe, and they STILL haven’t gotten it. © Also, there can be time-sensitive things in the magazine. Ideas for holidays or listings of events (which, you hope, have not already come and gone by the time the reader gets their copy).

25

Oh, and BTW–we worked so far in advance on everything that it was sort of mind-bending to be there. Christmas in July, every year. And people would come up to me and say, “I love this month’s issue.” And I would think, wait–do you mean the month that is currently on the calendar? Or the month that probably just arrived in mailboxes? Or the month that is on newsstands? Or the month that we just sent to the printer? Or the month that I just wrote? Or the month that I was just assigned…?