Circulation refers to the process of reaching readers. It is often overlooked by new and would-be publishers, as it isn’t an obvious component of magazine publishing to the average reader or consumer. While it is little known by the layperson, circulation is hugely significant in the project of publishing.

There are different models of circulation, a fact that you may be able to intuit. Readers can be reached through subscriptions, the newsstand, and in other venues, and a magazine can either have paid circulation or free circulation. The difference lies in whether people pay to read your magazine or whether they pick it up or have it delivered to them for free.

There are a few basic truths to circulation that can be mentioned: Canadian magazines are driven by subscription revenues; renewals are cheaper to attain than new readers from the newsstand, and circulation is immensely useful in researching and understanding your readers and hence is vastly beneficial to your advertising ventures.

Circulation is an involved and somewhat tricky discipline within magazine publishing. To learn more about circulation, the best course available is the Magazines Canada School for Circulation. This is simply the only course in Canada that deals with circulation in depth.

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You can rent one or several lists from other magazines, organizations or brokers, do a targeted direct mail campaign, and judge your potential circulation size (roughly) from your response rates. You can launch your magazine in tandem with another publication and use that controlled number as your circulation base, to start. Compare your title to others already in existence that may share certain characteristics. Do market research—if yours is a consumer title, find out about consumer habits (including media habits) using the Print Measurement Bureau’s data. These are all good ways of coming up with ballpark numbers.

You’ve seen it before—subscriptions that cost dramatically less per issue than the cover price. This isn’t required but customary. Most magazines set their subscription prices at a reduced rate from newsstand prices. More than this, they set a whole range of different subscription prices to correlate to different campaign offers. Take a survey of subscription cards that fall out of magazines on the rack. Calculate the discounts that magazines are offering. Set your subscription rates accordingly, higher or lower based on your circulation strategy.

Unless ‘lots of people’ refers to your immediate friends and family, you can trust that your editorial is working well. Editorial, however, does not often sell itself. What you need to do is better support your circulation and run a concerted campaign including marketing and promotions. Start thinking of ways you can get the word out about your magazine, and capture the people who enjoy it in your subscriber list (note operative words highlighted in italics).

Magazines that come with your daily newspaper are circulated based on a controlled circulation model. The publishers of these magazines have struck a distribution deal with the newspaper that offers the magazine access to the newspaper’s subscribers and supplies the newspaper with revenue. While newspapers do not think of other people’s magazines as their own reader bonuses, it is generally accepted that magazines in controlled distribution have to match fairly well the newspaper’s editorial, as the general public will see the two publications as connected.