How will AI change the indie publishing industry?
It’s hard to avoid conversations about AI in any industry at the moment, as creators and companies try to work out whether it’s a useful tool, an irrelevance, or a threat to the way they do business.
So how will this emerging technology affect the publishers of independent magazines?
While AIs are able to generate words and photographs in seconds, only parts of the indie publishing industry appear ripe for technology disruption.
This article will start by looking at the makeup of an indie publishing business, where there are disruption opportunities for AI, and where that seems less likely.
We’ll then look at different areas of the industry:
…and look at the potential applications of AI to each one in depth.
The key takeaway from this article is that most indies are fairly insulated from disruption, and probably too small to harness the technology in the same way as enterprise brands. That said, they can harness AI features in many of the tools they already use in their businesses. Larger publishers, meanwhile, should be looking closely at some interesting opportunities for AI to improve their services to advertising partners.
Which parts of the indie publishing industry can be disrupted with AI?
Before talking about AI disruption, it’s worth providing a brief overview of a typical publishing company to understand which areas are more or less exposed to technology.
Indie mags traditionally earn their revenue from advertising and events and magazine sales, with some titles also selling merchandise in a simple ecommerce store.
The print sales are often low-margin, and so the smaller publishers, in particular, rely on those other revenue streams to achieve sustainable operating margins across the business as a whole.
Crucially, though, this low-margin printed content is also the primary foundation of value in an indie mag business.
From kitchen-table passion products, to high-profile projects by big-name artists and photographers, independent magazines can be seen as communities of like-minded individuals, united by a common interest. It’s a very human and personal form of value.
This creates an engaged audience which – in turn – creates value for the publishers’ advertising clients.
According to indie subscription service Stack Magazines, indie mags have average subscriber retention rates higher than 70%, a number most digital content providers could only dream of.
This means that advertisers can reliably turn to indie publishing partners to reach curated audiences, with the incumbent trust of an advertising setting that the reader has paid for (and may well subscribe to). That applies both to the trusted medium of print and any paid events hosted by the magazine, which advertisers may sponsor.
Changing the formula drastically runs the risk of damaging the relationship between reader and magazine, and reducing their value to advertisers. So, while AI can automate processes that don’t need to be done by person, it’s debatable how applicable this could be to the content creation area of indie publishing.
That said, indie publishers are often financially vulnerable businesses, and so anything that can helpfully minimise their costs, without undermining customer value, will be welcome. This will be in areas such as accelerating creative production and versioning, advertising, and producing print-ready files – particularly as the technology matures over the coming years.
The expected cost-savings will depend heavily, though, on the size of the publisher, since AI lends its greatest efficiency gains at scale.
How will AI affect creativity for indie publishers
In this section, we will focus on the areas of the indie magazine creative process that can, and cannot be accelerated with AI. We’ll also look at the importance of the human touch to readers and creators, and where AI can open up new possibilities for indie mags.
Checking spelling and grammar have long been automated. Programs like ChatGPT are the next step for that and can be trained to recognise things like house-style, effectively automating parts of the sub-editing process.
But with many indie mags being labours of love, produced by and for small communities, it seems unlikely that too many of them will want to outsource the creation of their magazines fully to AI.
“…there’s no artistry there, which is kind of sad. I feel like the beauty of art and creation lies in that slowness,”
…said Zoe Thompson, founder of Sweet-Thang zine, speaking to The Guardian about resisting the influence of AI.
Rankin, the photographer behind the long-running magazine Hunger, recently published FAIK, an all-AI magazine made using consumer-level AI tools, like ChatGPT and Midjourney.
“I came up with the concept of a fake magazine, built entirely with AI systems. A way to both stretch the limits of these tools and challenge my own thinking around the concept.”
Despite being a 450 page high-end photography magazine, FAIK was entirely free to readers, perhaps a comment on the value of AI-produced “creativity”.
There is also no real prospect of AI replacing authentic, human experience as a source of ideas. LLMs can, by their very nature, only reproduce concepts they have already absorbed from existing data sources.
“AI can’t go out and talk to people and can’t witness events, which gives journalists an edge.”
…said Simon Cambers, writing about AI for Open Tennis.
Fashion, food, sports and photography take up a huge swathe of any magazine stand; those of any real quality require some level of human effort to produce a story. We don’t yet have AIs that can visit a new exhibition, climb a mountain or anything else that relies on human experience.
We also don’t have the AIs that can think outside the box, which is often where great design is found.
Magazines like ALL-IN, an unbound publication with loose pages packed into different containers each issue, push the boundaries of what makes a magazine a magazine. Similarly the surreal covers of Toilet Paper or decorative spines of Apartamento are a large part of the magazines’ visual identities.
While AI tools exist for image generation and assistance with layout and colour work, these big creative choices are brilliant precisely because they were original; unpredictable, even. Such conceptual ideation will only come from human designers for the foreseeable future.
Creative versioning, on the other hand, is an area where AI will be able to add something that wasn’t a realistic option before.
Many indies have already dabbled in customising the content of articles, for different segments of the audience means magazines can lean more heavily into what their readers are interested in, bringing some of the personalisation of online content to the printed page.
That sort of segmentation works best at scale, so smaller publications may not be able to take advantage of it. But, for those with large enough readerships, there’s an obvious appeal to having a sports magazine that focuses on racquet sports for one reader segment, or a restaurant review guide that leaves out steakhouses for their pescatarian readers.
The ‘nth’ degree of this type of segmentation, where AI comes into play, is that the brand may be able to deduce the customer’s favourite brands, colours or cuisine style based on their prior interactions. It could then be possible to differentiate dozens of versions of the content, based on the customer profile, with reduced manual oversight. Of course, there is the question of how a publisher can collect that data with the benefit of digital platforms; more on this below.
Using AI tools to automatically translate a magazine also opens up new potential readerships. There are obvious financial benefits to having a magazine available in multiple languages or countries, and connecting with those readers also expands the community the magazine serves.
Translation and transcreation, the process of translating to maintain and adapt aspects like tone, style and humour, have in the past been long and costly to do. Human translators work at a similar pace to writers and command the wages of skilled professionals. Translating humour is still probably beyond the reach of AI tools; nonetheless, they still promise to alleviate the effect of language and culture barriers and potentially help smaller magazines reach international audiences.
In short: AI is unlikely to ever replace creativity in indie publishing; indeed, it may undermine the customer value proposition. Where it can be a tool to ease or enhance the work humans are already doing, it seems most likely to find its niche.
What effect will AI have on indie print advertising?
In this section, we’ll look at how and where AI might be employed to make advertising more targeted and effective, how this will affect magazines with different sizes of readership, and whether digital content may have a role to play.
Advertising revenue has been returning to print in the last few years, recognising it as a high trust medium. Research by Magnetic found that magazine readers are 21% more likely to respond to advertising than social media users.
So, it’s natural that magazines would be interested in using AI for such purposes.
The ‘problem’ that AI can solve for magazine advertising is that most indies distribute the same content to every customer, with no applied insight as to whether that customer will engage with the message. This arguably limits the value for advertisers, since they know that a large percentage of their ad budget will not reach the intended persona..
The only workaround for this challenge, in the past, has been economies of scale: hundreds of thousands of brand impressions eliciting a desired action from sufficient customers to achieve a positive return on investment. Recently, personalisation has emerged as way to target content more accurately, however personalising content and ads incurs two other problems:
- having the tools and data to be able to reliably tailor the messaging for individual customers
- the time and financial costs of creative versioning in printed comms
AI can address both of those challenges, though broadly speaking, these efficiencies are mostly gleaned at scale. So the titles able to make most practical use of it would be larger indies, such as Kinfolk and i-D, with distributions in the hundreds of thousands or greater.
That said, with AI now appearing in many more everyday marketing tools for CRM, creative production and versioning, it’s feasible that smaller companies will be able to take advantage of the technology from this year onwards.
Collecting and using data for AI-based print advertising
Understanding your audience through data is at the heart of successful advertising.
With the costs of tooling coming down, it’s now easier than ever for smaller indie mags to make use of AI to capture, interpret and act on that data. Enhanced intelligence about readers should lead to more relevant, and profitable, advertising.
The catch is that relies on a magazine having collected the data in the first place, and many indies may lack the necessary customer engagement settings. Data is more often collected via digital engagement channels online and not all magazines maintain and monitor those to the same extent as larger advertisers.
Some magazines, like Summit Journal, proudly exist in offline form only; others will have a limited number of online articles but maintain the body of the magazine in print only. This is, in part, to preserve the value of the printed magazine: if you want to read the articles, you have to buy the issue.
Putting more content online theoretically allows these publishers to collect more data on their users, which could make their advertising more effective – with a potential trade-off for the exclusivity of their print.
Prompting offline users to online actions, through QR codes, webstore vouchers and redemption data, is another possibility. Magazines could also invest further in email marketing, for instance, which can also reveal customers’ interests based on the content they click on in the emails. Giving customers the choice of an offer for a red, blue or green dress, for example, might yield really useful insights around how to further personalise content for that individual.
The costs of AI tooling are starting to come down. This will gradually bring this more granular, highly targeted use of AI within the budgets of smaller indie mags
Balancing the enhanced data collection possibilities of online content, with the higher quality and trust perception of offline content, will be a challenge for all publishers.. However they manage it, collecting that rich customer data is the key to making AI personalisation really effective.
AI and creative versioning in print
One output of better data and segmentation could be having different versions of a magazine, promoting different ads, events and marketing to different audiences.
It’s easy to imagine a climbing magazine, for example, having an ad page or advertorial on climbing clothing for one customer, equipment in another, and a tourism destination in a third, recreating the kind of ad personalisation that’s now commonplace in online settings.
Similar variations are possible with covers and inserts, tailored to readers based on their interests.
It should even be possible to drill down into the specifics of what readers respond to, tailoring colour palettes and cover art to them. AI assistants could be trained to look for indicators of these among data on readers and then select from a database of designs or variations made by human designers.
AI is now also widely used to optimize campaign performance. Promotion sizing, where the value of an offer or discount is pitched at the right level to activate a user, is a prime candidate for using AI to work out what size and cost of promotion would be effective for a given customer profile.
Variable data printing for print personalisation
Creative versioning and personalisation in print relies on a process known as variable data printing, which allows different pieces on the same print run to have different content; the main way magazines are personalised. It works by pulling content from a database, so in theory any element of a magazine can be personalised; advertising, names and addresses, even articles.
In practice, of course, the personalised content has to be written, and designed if it’s something bigger than a few lines of copy. In the past, this has meant personalisation was typically limited to small changes that drew on existing databases, like readers’ names or addresses from delivery lists.
Using AI, however, there’s the possibility of automating the versioning of assets, based on the customer data, cutting out manual administration and making personalisation a much more realistic option for publishers. Read our article on print personalisation here.
How is AI changing print production?
Park|Graphius has experimented with using AI, both in print and in the services Park|Graphius Studio offer, like artworking and retouching. While there are some promising areas, they have to be closely monitored to make sure they meet the high standards we have for quality printing.
Artworking is preparing projects for print by refining the imagery, colours, and positioning of elements. AI tools can be used for simple tasks, like removing backgrounds, which free the human team up for focusing on fine detailed tasks. Retouching is another process that potentially offers time savings when automated.
AI tools are not yet capable of producing high-quality retouching but they can be a tool to accelerate the process, getting human users to the stage where they can add most value rather than replacing them altogether.
There are also AI tools which can to some extend automate making files print-ready; an example is the PrintFactory RIP. Similarly with retouching, however, this comes with risks and is probably better suited for web printing than high-end productions. Park’s Lucy Spokes comments…
“Artworking with AI needs to be approached with caution. We’ve experimented a little, and removing backgrounds and image editing does have to be checked, as the speed at which it’s done via AI can sometimes mean it’s not 100% for good quality printing. Many processes still require manual intervention or checking.”
As Matt Cummins, Managing Director at Park|Graphius, points out, “automation is an ally, not a replacement.”
In an industry where specific shades of colour, millimetres of margin, and the logistics of layout are crucial, effective use of automation means freeing up the human workers for where they’re most needed.
“Automating parts of the process gives teams the time and capacity to contribute at touchpoints where it matters, adding the personal touch that takes a project from good to great.”
A balanced future for AI and indie publishing
“We are kind of reaching a peak for AI slop and how it feels like the internet has gone to hell. A printed magazine is a great counter to that and provides something tangible and real and lasting”
…said Jackson Ryan, one of the creators of Continue, a magazine of video game culture that aims to be print-first and fully supported by readers.
With AI, we’re currently living through the explosion that comes with a lot of new technologies and or indie mags, the possibilities are broad. Though Rankin’s FAIK was intended as part experiment and part warning, it has also proved that you can write and design an entire magazine with next to no human involvement (though as an artistic statement, one can debate whether the concept of FAIK could ever be repeated).
Indie magazines often cater to small and passionate communities. One of the biggest questions is how readers will respond to the various experiments with AI that indie magazines will make in the coming years.
A beginner to climbing might simply use a search engine to recommend a good crampon or route, but a climber passionate enough to subscribe to a climbing magazine might want more in-depth analysis. Not to mention the factual errors that AIs have already got a reputation for making.
Many of the AI tools on the market are called assistants. That might be an acknowledgement that AI is most effective when it’s being used to help a human do something they do well.
That approach is likely what readers of independent magazines will want to see across the board; AI used as a tool to enhance human activity, not replace human creativity.
