The best magazine software gives an intuitive publishing experience, saves a lot of time, and lets your readers access digital magazines on their desired screen devices. Check the list of modern features that your next magazine software must have.
Every publisher has its own way of defining the best in a magazine software – some may even have visualized the one that simplifies their digital magazine publishing process alongside improving branding and performance with its advanced features. In designing a magazine that will cater to your audience, everything depends on your needs and expectations.
Digital magazine publishing is comparatively new to the other forms of publishing as it garnered popularity with the emergence of mobile devices, specifically with the release of the iPad in 2010. In short, the ‘desired’ magazine publishing software is still at the stage of advancement that can offset your current as well as future challenges.
Today, you’re able to convert PDFs into flipbooks, as well as have access to trendy templates to create and run a completely new digital magazine. But is this still your priority? Or, do you wish to give the best digital magazine experience? There is a lot more to offer to your customers when the digital magazine publishing software offers you the following: more controls at your fingertip, a plethora of new features, an intuitive publishing experience, and ease of designing, publishing, and distributing your magazine. Here are some of the features that can potentially solve publishing challenges, increase productivity, and improve brand visibility.
Magazine software is the backbone of the publishing industry that increases productivity and improves brand visibility.
7 features to have in a magazine software
Although there are hundreds of features to have, below is the list of some of the powerful features for each stage. The list includes features that help editors lubricate publishing workflow and management, and ensure their end users enjoy the aesthetic and visual pleasure of consumption. Here it goes:
7. Block/Issue cloning: Merge to make new
You heard it right; it’s now possible to clone the complete issue or even particular blocks you wish to. It’s as easy as drag-and-drop. This feature self-creates a new issue on behalf of your creators, which saves a lot of time and effort in creating new issues from scratch. The time saved can be channeled into other productive tasks such as brainstorming new marketing ideas and strategizing ways to reach a modern audience.
6. Google fonts and custom fonts: Branding with original fonts
Font style, size and colour are the major elements in a design that speak about your brand more than words. Using brand-specific fonts in all your publications sets the stage for readers. The visual representation is what your brand personality is and thus, having the same font for the entire design is of top priority. You can find a newer or upgraded magazine software that integrates Font Manager and Google Fonts to allow you to use your original, custom fonts.
5. Preview capabilities: A sight in advance
Just like previewing photos before uploading, magazine software gives you infinite chances to preview your magazine before making it public. Once you genuinely see content through the user’s lenses, you can intuitively design magazines that end users would love to read.
4. Interactive Magazine: Make it playful
There’s no doubt that we like interactivity and ease of consumption. The good use of interactivity is why readers love to read digital publications. While some allow you to add media and external links, other types of magazine software permit adding jump links, pop-ups, widgets, icons, and image sequences. They continue to feature adding videos from external sources (like YouTube, Vimeo, or BrightCove), as well as full-length movies.
As readers now don’t settle for a simple and plain reading experience, you can make use of such interactive elements (in the right way) in the digital magazine maze of your readers with even the minimal details. Such a magazine software also allows publishers to enhance the quality of an image via an integrated editing tool. A detailed and clear layout with smoother navigation and dynamic text placement makes the digital magazine app more user-friendly.
3. DAM: All digital assets in a central, freely accessible system
Looking for a file in an ‘X’ folder to include in a magazine is one of the tedious tasks designers/creators are often challenged with. One can imagine the redundancies involved. What would be more beneficial than having a digital asset management (DAM) system that’s freely accessible to all stakeholders? A DAM is a permanent solution to unstructured multimedia storage. With it, your editing team will be able to add images and videos to the magazine (in creation) effortlessly and in just a few clicks.
It’s difficult to say whether giving access to team members can help recover the effort and time spent in the past years, but its results are no less important. Though you won’t be able to recover those efforts, you can possibly turn the wheels. Explore a bit more about its advantages and you’ll get to know the value it holds for your organization. It’ll be a game changer for those who have long struggled with failing to access files at the time of need.
2. Fully responsive website: Let the reading continue
Presently, there are 6.6 billion smartphone subscribers in the world, which is 79 percent more than the number of mobile subscribers recorded in 2016 (just six years ago). The great news is people are buying devices to access content and subscribe to ones they love more. This insight ultimately makes mobile readers your next target. To invite and entice them, your magazine software must have a responsive design feature that lets end users access your magazine on any device – iPad, mobiles, laptops, etc. Fully responsive websites are built using HTML and CSS, which enable the web pages to automatically adjust themselves to preserve the intuitive feel and UX across all devices. This way, end users will enjoy reading your magazines on their favourite device, and you’ll be able to attract a completely new group of people and strengthen your customer base.
1. Get an app: Revenue extension
Not only mobile web browsing but also mobile readership extends to mobile applications. If you’re an InDesign user, you already have a magazine app that’s built using MIB files. This tool requires content creators and graphic designers to design magazines, as well as some technical brains to easily download them as MIBs and feed them to the created apps. This isn’t rocket science, but what challenges publishers is the lack of flexibility in distributing the content on all devices; the tool lets them design magazines for just one targeted device at a time. Magazine publishers have to put in extra time and effort into authoring content for all of the devices on which they wish to publish their magazines. How about a magazine software with a multi-device export feature? It will let digital magazine publishers design (magazine app) for all smart devices in just one click. With the advancement of technology, you have been given a choice between your own branded app and an MIB-built app.
Getting a magazine app may sound expensive to all, but it’s not! Our mag+Now software supports publishing content directly to your branded app. All you need to do is create and push fresh content forward and our backend team will handle the technicalities behind the app publishing process – from building an app to launching and updating. You also get complete access to app management. Also, the mag+ reviewer app allows you to test your app in real time before launching it in the market. What else do you get? You’ll be able to use free app analytics and explore mobile marketing strategies. Since your next goal is to improve mobile conversions, you may want to have in-app features, such as social sign-in (increase awareness and get user details), ad space (to monetize content), etc. This being said, app publishing support is likely the topmost feature that a magazine software should offer you.
If you’re new to the magazine publishing industry, then ensuring an app before a website may not be as beneficial as it seems. However, you can rely on a magazine software that features an advanced HTML5 authoring tool to distribute content that’s fully responsive to all screen sizes, orientations, and devices.
Our mag+Now tool is among such modern tools that build magazine apps or fully responsive content with minimal effort. You can create any design and change its orientation in a click to fit any screen, with no quality loss. The tool offers you more than you can imagine. It’s an ultra-modern blend of authoring tools and platform features designed for you to deliver immersive experiences to end users. The tool integrates a DAM for media storage, CMS for content workflow, and analytical tools for remarkable insights into publications across web and mobile applications.
With this tool, you can password-protect your issue when sharing with a specific group of people via shareable URLs or email invitations – the modern feature to encrypt your data. Moreover, you can create a trial user account for stakeholders to review your creation and share feedback before its final publication. Its custom domain management feature allows you to host content through your own web domain. And, there are many more advanced features that make your digital magazine-making process easy and hassle-free.
These latest and intuitive features of a magazine software can uplift your branding strategy. If you’d like to know more about these features and how they can benefit in building engaging digital magazines, get in touch with us today.