Issue Three Prints Now Available Online
And behind-the-scenes of making them!
Hi all,
It’s Noah again, with a new update. After launching in select stores last month, we’re excited to now offer prints directly, via our own website. You can shop limited edition prints of Issue Three now at our new, physical goods store: taxhardware.com.
About these prints
The prints are available for $35, with free shipping in the US. I understand that this is a premium price point, but this is a limited-edition run, focused on our top supporters. It’s printed on premium, heavy-weight paper, with crisp images and full-range colors. It looks great on a coffee table :)
What’s next for physical copies?
While Tax is primarily a digital-first publication, we’re exploring a few potential ways forward for our physical copies:
DTC: Selling directly to customers through our own website (see above). This is great for maintaining a high-quality customer experience, but can be hard with traveling and needing to manually ship and manage each order.
Retail/wholesale: Manual outreach to individual retailers/newsstands to stock Tax. Great for building relationships, but difficult to manage inventory and shipments.
Channel partner/Distributor: Working with a distributor to expand our footprint into key stores in more markets. In this model, we ship a bulk order to a distributor, who then works with retailers on our behalf. This could be great way to scale our distribution into more independent bookstores around the USA and Europe. The potential downsides to this model are:
giving up a higher portion of sales (most of these run on a consignment model)
losing some control over how, where, and when our prints are distributed
additional liability if the prints don’t sell in each of these stores (in which case, we have to eat the cost!)
Hybrid: some combination of the above
We’ll keep you posted on how this all develops. In the meantime, if you’d like to purchase a physical copy please use our store link above :)
Talk soon,
Noah
PS- see below for a peak behind-the-scenes at making these prints!
Behind the scenes/printing process
This is our first time doing physical prints, and we had a lot to learn. It turns out that creating a digital PDF and a physical print are quite different! BONUS: see if you can spot the typos in the final edition 😅
Spec considerations
One of the tricky parts of print publishing is balancing quality v. price. Are we willing to pay a bit more for higher-quality paper? Is the additional weight (and subsequent higher Fedex fee) worth the crisper images that come from non-translucent paper? While this might change over-time, we ultimately chose to give this issue a more premium feel, at a higher price.
To bring our digital PDF into the real world, we also had to re-format our margins and pages to work with trim, gutter, and bleed standards for our publisher.
After a few weeks of re-formatting and back-and-forth with the publisher, we finally went to print!
