The Reasons for CP Magic Magazine

Today’s post combines two questions about the reasons for CP Magic magazine. When did I decide to publish a magazine and why.

The first question is easy enough to answer. The first issue published January 1, 2020. It has published every month since then.

The second question takes a little bit longer to answer.

The Reasons for CP Magic

Reason #1

Late in 2019, I was looking for a way to monetize the blog. I’d been blogging for years by then and had many followers, but I’d done very little to monetize it. As I recall, the only marketing I was doing was for portrait work and occasional classes. I needed something more; something more reliable and steady.

After some pondering, my first thought was to publish an expanded newsletter and charge $1 a week. That doesn’t sound like much, I know, but I was operating on the McDonald’s hamburger plan. Sell a lot of items at a low cost for each item.

That seemed like the best option. I like to write, after all, and I had lots of content on the blog that I could expand into a newsletter format. I was already doing a weekly newsletter. How much more difficult could it be to do a weekly newsletter with enough content to be worth a dollar a week?

It may seem like a short leap from doing an expanded newsletter to publishing a magazine, but it took me a while to take that leap.

You see, I never thought I’d become a publisher. Technically, I already was a publisher because I’d been blogging for so many years. Blogging is a form of publishing, but I didn’t think of it that way. It was more along the lines of marketing.

So I hesitated when the thought of doing a magazine first came to mind.

Reason #2

What finally made me launch the magazine?

Basically, it was to fill a need that I had been unable to fill in any other way.

I’d been looking for an art magazine that interviewed artists and shared a glimpse into their working process. The colored pencil magazines already on the market were excellent and still are. They interviewed artists and they had tutorials.

But the interviews and tutorials were not by the same artist in each issue. That was what I wanted; the opportunity to get to know the artists and then see how they worked in the same publication. You could think of it as spending a day in their studio if you like.

I eventually concluded that the only way to get what I was looking for was to make it. If other colored pencil artists liked what I was doing, so much the better.

Those are The Main Reason for CP Magic Magazine

Now you know where it all began.

This month’s issue is issue number 72. That’s six years of publishing a monthly magazine. Would you believe me if I told you I never expected that to happen? It’s true!

And that just goes to show that when a door of opportunity opens, you can never tell where it will lead!

This post is part of a series in which readers ask questions about my life as an artist, and I answer them. Most of the posts this month will concern one of these questions. If you have a question you’d like to ask, please ask it. It’s never too late to get your burning questions answered!

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