As I said, I think the profit would be best invested in maintaining, expanding and improving the paper itself, and maybe for other projects later on. Certainly some palestinian aid or something could be a good idea, especially if publicised. But I think this kind of thing should wait until the paper is established. What are your thoughts?
we will not be revolutionary unless we act in a revolutionary manner, the money should go to charity, or most of it anyway
just my opinion comrades
Handing out money to charity is not revolutionary. Churches have been doing it for centuries and I wouldn't consider them to be revolutionary... If any money was made I agree it should go to the building of revolutionary goals, firstly media. I would like a RedTV for example But expect negative figures. As a general rule of thumb: Unless you can print 1000 or more papers per issue (and sell them of course), it is not profitable.
We need to consider how much money will actually go to charity if we decide to give it to charity. Let's say the paper costs 10p to produce and we sell it for 20p, 100% mark-up, not unreasonable for something so cheap to produce and we want to keep it accessible and therefore cheap. So a Comrade produces twenty copies and goes out to a demo to sell them, even if all copies are sold only £2 profit has been made, nowhere near enough for a worthwhile donation to a registered charity. I think we would be doing a much bigger service to revolutionary causes if we kept the money in the pot to ensure that we can continue to produce papers, and continue to promote causes like Palestinian solidarity. Personally, I don't see money as a big issue, producing papers and spreading the word is more important, if someone was interested in the paper but didn't have any change on them at the time I would happily just give them a copy and pay cost price out of my own pocket, after all, papers are cheap to produce. Plus, the only viable option we have for production is to print the papers autonomously, in other words, send a copy of the PDF to all Comrades involved, and they can print as many copies as they think they might be able sell, as opposed to having one Comrade print them all up and send them out in the post.
we could sell it along the lines of the big issue aswell. people will pay about a pound for the big issue i think, so that way homeless people can make money and we can aswell. That way things will be so much easier. But if we do it online to start with, how do we get ads on the site.
I think the figures of Red Son are non-realistic. To give an overview of actual costs, I'll point out the costs we make with printing the Offensief paper: - First note that we print the paper at a friendly printer on a non-commercial basis. - The setup of the paper is A3 size (double folded A2), 8 pages (2 x A2), black&white with the logo on the outside in red. - We print 250 papers per issue. - This costs 400 euro's. - So the paper costs 1,60 euro's per piece. We sell them for 1 euro and 2 euro solidarity price. - This is excluding postal service for subscriptions, which adds another 1,70 or so. I don't think prices in the UK or US are much lower.
Offensief is an established organisation though, Comrade. Although I know you were just using your paper as an example, I don't think we should even be thinking about doing 8 pages in A3 yet, I'd say 4-8 pages in A4 is far more doable. RCPB-ML's paper, Workers' Weekly is 4 pages in A4, full colour, once a week, and they sell it for 50p, although they don't take a great deal of money, being such a small group and all, I'm 99% certain they don't make a loss. Our papers, Proletarian and Lalkar are 20-30 pages in A4, monthly, black and white with a red header, we sell them for £1 each and definitely turn over a small profit. With this in mind, I think it would be fairly easy to produce a 4-8 page paper once every two weeks and break even, we can just print them at the UPS Store/Mail Boxes Etc.
Lets put this issue on hold. Time spent on the presumption of success can't be taken away from the time spent to get the paper set up initially.
Agreed, money shouldn't be an issue just now.
I feel that in the short term any profit made should go straight back into the paper. Once we are better established then we can start to look at donating money to worthy causes. Though realistically I feel it's the paper that will be needing the donations, especially in the early stages.
