Ex-Newsweek President Edmiston Launching Seven New iPad Mags

paidContent reporting:
Nomad Editions, established to devise new magazines for tablet subscriptions, has seven or eight more titles in the pipeline, says CEO Mark Edmiston, a former Newsweek president.
Since its free iOS carousel app went live on May 11, it has sold “thousands” of subscriptions to its five weekly titles - BodySmart (weight loss), Real Eats (food), U+Me (social networking), Uncorked (wine) and Wide Screen (movies) - each of which is a new launch and costs $9.99 per year or $0.99 per month.
“What surprised me is, we’re getting almost 50 percent of people taking the year,” Edmiston told paidContent, explaining about 10 percent of free app downloaders convert to subscribe.
Nomad is trying to prove that tablets can be platforms for new as well as existing brands. Rather than convert existing titles to tablet, it taps journalists to devise new titles along with it, with an interesting new model - for pay, each editor takes five percent of subscription income, whilst writers split 30 percent between them.
“We look for editors but they look for us too,” says Edmiston, who also co-founded the JEGI media investment advisory. “The analogy is closer to a movie studio than to a trade publishing company.” Three of Nomad’s current five titles were conceived not by Nomad itself but by budding new editors. Nomad will shortly add Sustainable Money (business), Good Dog (pets), a spirituality title and one for collectors of 1960s muscle cars.
For Edmiston, the opportunity so far is all about iPad. But Nomad magazines may end up on other platforms - each is actually a HTML5 site, which just happens to be encased in an iOS application. Editors even handle production, using an automated workflow inside software called TreeSaver. “We’re bottom-up rather than top-down,” he says. “We have copy editors so we do impose discipline on the process, but we try not to impose on the choice of stories.”
http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-interview-ex-newsweek-president-edmiston-launching-seven-new-ipad-mags