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Design & Pricing

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Successful Adsheet Design and Pricing

Basic Ad Sheet Layout Considerations

A good page layout for an ad sheet, if you want generate income, is a 3-column page. Obviously, you can sell ads of any size, and I'm sure some of your advertisers will want you to offer them odd things. The best reply, when someone wants an odd-ball size or some other special consideration, is to say yes, anything is possible, so long as you are ready to pay the price. You sell ads by the column inch. Three columns give you, the publisher, more column inches to sell, while maintaining a size and appearance for ads that will still serve the advertiser and any readers well. And a nice, clean, 3-column page looks nice. 

But if you feel the need to offer more options, you simply need to know what the space on the page really costs, and what you really need to earn from each ad. That way, it will not matter so much what the size, shape or payout of an ad might be, you can sell to everyone at a fair price, knowing that you are not cheating some while giving away free space to others. And hopefully, you will also make enough money from the ad sheet to pay for the time you spend selling and then building all those ads, not to mention, paying the printer and any distribution service (such as the post office) you may use.

Designing the Small Ad Sheet

I've included a few images to help you see what your ad sheet pages might look like, and what the ad space works out to be in some typical pages. You can use these page layout images to figure your basic costs. But, ultimately, you must work with your local print shop to decide how things will work.  

Example Images: (requires free Adobe Reader)

For example, the images I supply show only a 1/4" margin all around the outside of each page. This works just fine for most copy shops that use electrostatic copiers (such as Xerox brand equipment). It will not work for a print shop using actual printing presses. Typically, an offset press needs at least a half-inch margin on the leading edge, so the paper can be grabbed and pulled through the press. This difference in outside margin makes a practical difference in the area available for ads.

For the most professional appearance, you should lay the page out to fit the equipment it will run on. This keeps all outside margins looking good, enabling the ad sheet to do the best job of presenting the ads to readers. But you can also do as many publishers do, and cheat a little. You can lay out your pages to fit the copiers, and then, if your ad sheet ends up being run on offset presses, you can simply ask the printer to reduce the page to fit. The difference in overall size will be insignificant, in most cases. (A great many news papers, shoppers and glossy magazines are also reduced slightly when going to press, so you'll be in good company.)

Selecting Back Page Options

The images provided show one front page, one inside page and 2 optional back pages.  If your ad sheet will not be mailed at all on a regular basis, then your back page will be just like the inside pages, and you can simply use that basic design.

If you will be distributing many or most of your ad sheets by mail, and you decide to simply fold the publication in half, then you should use the half-fold back page layout.  This will take away some of your available ad space, but may work better if you have 6 pages or more.  Use the tri-fold back page layout if you decide to letter-fold your publication for mailing.

Of course, any ad sheets placed in envelopes for mailing do not need an address box on the publication itself, so the back page can be set up like an inside page.

It's a good idea to add a header or footer to all pages after the front page, with a single line of type that identifies the ad sheet.  This would be placed at the very top or the very bottom of each page.  You may need to adjust the available ad space to compensate for this added information.