Publishing Specialty Guides

Publishing Specialty Guides

No matter where you live or what your publishing experience is, you can make a ton of money publishing specialty guides. They are a quick sale, easy to produce and highly profitable.

What is a specialty guide? Usually it is a newsprint tabloid numbering from 12 to 48 pages, containing information and advertising about a local area. Specialty guides can include restaurant guides, auto trader guides, new resident guides, apartment guides, real estate guides, tourist guides, and college student guides. They make their money from the display advertising that makes up the biggest majority of their content.

Restaurant guides can be some of the quickest and easiest to produce. Let’s take a look at how you can jump into this lucrative field and start making money today!

The first thing you have to do is survey your market. Make a list of all the restaurants in your market area, from the fanciest upscale dining establishments to the fast food places and greasy spoon diners within a 20 to 25 mile range. Ideally you will have a pretty long list to work with.

The next step is to decide what your advertising rates will be and print up rate cards. These don’t have to be anything elaborate, just a one page rate card on simple copy paper will suffice, though using colored paper will make you look a lot more professional.

Ad rates should be sufficiently high enough to make a nice profit, but not so high that you scare potential customers away. In this case, you want quantity.

Let’s look at the numbers. We use different newspaper printing plants around the country to print our Gypsy Journal RV Travel Newspaper, depending on where we are traveling at press time. We printed a recent copy in Tucson , Arizona . The cost for 10,000 copies of our 36 page tabloid was about $1600. Since our front page is a cover and does not have advertising, we actually have 35 pages to sell. Divide the $1600 printing bill by 35 pages and you come up with a page cost of $45.71. You should mark your page cost up at least four times, which would come to $182.84 in this case. But let’s make it easy on ourselves and charge $175 per page. That would be our price for a full page ad. Ads in specialty guides are sold in modular sizes of Full Page, Half Page, Quarter Page, and Eighth Page.

A half page ad should be priced at more than half the price of a full page, so we’ll charge $90 for a half page ad. Again, cost for a quarter page ad will be more than one fourth of a full page, so let’s charge $50. We’ll charge $30 for an eighth page ad. As you can see, the smaller the ad, the more advertisers are actually paying in terms of space. This makes it easier to sell the larger ads. You can also charge a premium for the first and second inside pages, the two center pages, and the back page. Or you can use this special placement to lure a larger advertiser. You should never put less than a half page ad on these pages. Again, the front page is your cover and will not contain any advertising. You should get payment in full, or at least a deposit of 50%, because the restaurant business is notorious for deadbeats when it comes to paying for advertising.

A few minutes with a calculator will show you how much money you can take in with a specialty guide. Let’s assume you sell 10 full page advertisement, for a total of $1,750. You have more than covered your printing bill, and still have 25 pages to sell! So let’s say you sell 20 half page ads, for a total of $1,800. You still have 15 pages to sell, so we’ll pretend you sell another 20 quarter page ads, for a total of $1,000, and you still have 10 pages left to sell! Okay, let’s say you sell 50 eighth page ads for a total of $1,500. That still leaves you with over four empty pages. You can fill that space with maps showing the location of your advertisers, local tourist information, artwork, or maybe ads from area attractions. Just to make our example easy, we’ll assume you don’t fill the remaining space with ads and make nothing from those.

If my numbers are correct, you took in $6050 in advertising sales. Printing cost was $1600, which leave us with $4450. If you do your own sales and production (and you should), you don’t have much overhead. Let’s say $450 for the gas you burn running around selling ads, and other incidental expenses. You’re still left with a profit of $4,000! And it shouldn’t take more than a week or two at most to sell the ads, plus another week to put it all together on your computer, and get it printed. Let’s say you were a bit lazy, sales were slower than expected, and you had to return to many advertisers a couple of times to get their commitment, so the entire project took you a month. $1,000 a week is pretty good money starting out in the publishing business, when you have little or no up front investment except your time. Keep in mind that these numbers are just a rough example. Printing prices vary greatly in different parts of the country, you may have more or fewer pages in your guide, and you may decide to charge more or less than our example.

Once your guides are printed, they are distributed free at local motels, hotels, campgrounds, chamber of commerce offices, visitor centers, libraries, book stores, and wherever a lot of people come and go.

There are some downsides to this business. Advertising is a hard sell. You have to have a thick skin, because you will get a lot of rejection, especially at first. If you are just not a salesman, you might consider hiring someone with a good sales background. Even if you pay them 25% of their total sales, your profit will still be every good. As stated, restaurants can be very hard to get your money from if you don’t get paid in advance. In my time in the newspaper business, I had to literally eat a lot of advertising dollars.

One of the great things about publishing guides like this is that they are renewable. Next year, or next season, you can come back and do it all over again! And you will find the sales much easier the second time around, because you already have an established track record with your advertisers. You could expand on this business by publishing a restaurant guide a month in different areas, or concentrate on one area and do a restaurant guide one month, a real estate guide the next, a guide to local antique stores the next, and on and on. This could be a perfect business for fulltime RVers who want to spend some time in an area. You could develop a series of guides in areas where you travel and earn a comfortable income while seeing the country.