Ryta asks: Hello Shirelle. I hope you’re doing great. If you wanted to start a teen’s magazine, how would you go about it?
Thanks for your question Ryta, and yes I am absolutely doing great! Especially because… Wow, what a cool question!
I have to confess, I have absolutely no idea how to get a magazine started, whether for teens or anyone else.
But I do hear a lot that the publishing business is really difficult today. So I’m not sure I’d recommend that you make the huge investment a new magazine would require, without being able to know that you have an audience first.
And to do that, I’d suggest that you try something else – something I know as much about as any dog who ever lived! I think you should start a
website!
You see, starting a website is really inexpensive. Handsome only pays a fee of a few dollars a month for me to have AskShirelle.com all to myself. That frees me to put all my energies into making the site as great as it can be. Now part of that is that I have a fantastic website designer, Sherice. She knows all the stuff that Handsome and I don’t, about how to create graphics and set up the system so that the site works right. But you could save even more money if you got one of those website templates that are always advertised, and then you could just load it up with all the fun teen stuff you wanted to write, and pictures you download or upload, or even create yourself.
And then, if you’ve created something really unique, and other people get into it and like it… maybe you’ll be set up to make a deal and get a real paper magazine made!
Hmmm… this is getting me to thinking… hey do you think if I put pictures of Justin Bieber on each issue of “The Pawprint,” I could get it published too?!
Thanks for the cool question!
Shirelle