If you’ve ever wanted publish your own magazine, you now have the ultimate solution. MagCloud is a print on demand service from HP that allows you to publish and sell your own magazine with virtually zero upfront costs. All you need to do is design and layout your document, save as a PDF, and upload to MagCloud to start the publishing process.

MagCloud will automatically generate an attractive magazine preview and allows you to order a proof copy for yourself. Once you’re ready to publish your magazine to the world, you simply select a sale price and any profit earned above the printing & shipping costs is deposited into your PayPal account from MagCloud.

As far as we can tell, there isn’t a more efficient way to publish a true print magazine with no minimum order quantities, which makes MagCloud a truly novel solution.

Practical Uses:

• Create a monthly magazine for your school or non-profit
• Express your passion for gardening by producing a magazine focused on regional gardening tips
• Make money from your writing by creating a collected works magazine
• Add value to your blog or website by developing a magazine to highlight your best content

Insider Tips:

• Use the templates provided on site to make sure that your PDF is formatted correctly for printing
• Your magazine must have between 4 and 100 pages (in multiples of four)
• You can publish your magazine privately if you are not ready to share
• If published privately, use the on site tools to generate a link for sharing with only the people you choose
• Use tags and a description to give your magazine the best possible promotion

What we liked:

• Uploading the PDF was quick and easy
• The magazine preview function worked well
• The print cost is very reasonable and there are no minimum order requirements

What we didn’t like:

• There were several places for entering the magazine description; this got a bit confusing
• The site does not work with European paper sizes, though it sends magazines to the UK

Alternatives:

• There is nothing quite like MagCloud

Company Info:

• Launched: June 2008
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA
• Founded by: Hewlett Packard
• Web site: www.magcloud.com

Costs:

• Free to publish your magazine, printing costs $0.20/page

Rating:

• 4 out of 5 (great)