Entering our competition? Louise Holdenhas some pre-Christmas advice
This is the final instalment of our guide. After this you're on your own. So, although you may be planning to take a Christmas break from the glamorous world of school publishing, take stock, before you hit the media party season, of where your magazine is going and make sure you have put in the groundwork for the new year.
Get in touch with printers and, if possible, choose who you're going to work with before term ends. There may be a lot of toing and froing involved in getting the right design in the right format for printing, and if you leave it too late many printers might decide that your project is not worth the hassle. If you have been in touch with a printer for a couple of months you should have all the information and time you need to get your magazine printed to deadline.
This year you also have the option to publish your school magazine as an e-zine. E-zines, or electronic magazines, are published online or distributed via e-mails that contain articles and other components of typical print magazines. This makes possible new types of content, such as interactive polls, quizzes and e-mail letters pages.
There are several ways to create an e-zine. The simplest format is a Word document. Word allows you to construct a single- or multiple-page document with text, photographs, graphs, videos and graphics. Look at how printed magazine pages are formatted, then create a similar page in Word. You can e-mail the finished document as an attachment.
Newer versions of Word allow you to export or save your document as a PDF file, so it will be compatible with all operating systems. You can also add a PDF file to a website, and it looks much better than a standard Word document.
If you are more adept at graphic design and page layout (and have access to design software), then most design programmes will also allow you to save your document as a PDF file. Graphic-design programmes have more features than a basic word-processing programme such as Word.
Some companies sell e-zine services, which allow you to insert text and images into a pre-designed template and to manage your e-mail distribution.
Get your team together for a final meeting before Christmas and look again at some of the decisions you made at the first brainstorm. Are you still on track? If things have changed, is everyone happy with the changes? Make some resolutions for the new year. If you have a plan for what happens in January, it will be easier to pick up where you left off after the tinsel clears.
See you at the awards do, darlings!
