Magazine editorial calendar template
Plan up to 12 issues in one place: the on-sale date, the theme, the special section advertisers can buy into, and the features with who owns them and how far along they are. Copy and ad deadlines are suggested from the on-sale date, and you can change any of them. Print it or open it in Excel. No sign-up.
What an editorial calendar is for
An editorial calendar is the plan of what each coming issue will be about. For every issue it records when it goes on sale, its theme, the main features and who is responsible for each one. It gives the editor a view of the year, so themes do not repeat and seasonal subjects land in the right month. It also gives writers and photographers their commissions early enough to do good work, and it tells the rest of the business what is coming.
The example above is a monthly regional magazine with three issues: spring gardens in March, renovating an older home in April and local food in May. Copy is due 35 days and ads 28 days before each on-sale date. Those numbers are only an example; set them to match your own printer and team.
Editorial calendar, production schedule and flatplan
The three plans answer different questions. The editorial calendar says what goes into each issue, looking months ahead. The production schedule says when each step of one issue has to happen, from ad close to files at the printer, counted back from the print date. The flatplan says where everything sits, page by page, once the issue is being built. The calendar comes first: its themes decide what is sold and commissioned, and its deadlines become the first dates in the production schedule.
Selling special sections to advertisers
Many publishers put the editorial calendar in their media kit, because advertisers plan around it. A garden centre wants to be in the spring gardens issue; a kitchen fitter wants the renovation issue. A special section turns that interest into something to sell: a buyers’ guide, a supplier directory or a sponsored round-up tied to the theme, with its own ad deadline. Write the tie-in next to each issue so the sales team can pitch it months ahead, and give advertisers the ad deadline at the same time as the theme. When a theme changes, tell sales before the new calendar reaches clients.
Where spreadsheet calendars break
A calendar in a spreadsheet works for a small team planning a few issues. It starts to break when the plan changes after it has been shared. A feature moves to the next issue, a special section sells better than expected and needs more pages, a writer drops out. The editor updates one copy, sales still pitch from the version in the media kit, and production plans pages from a third. Nobody can see from the sheet which ads have been booked against a theme, or which features are actually filed, so the gaps show up the week the issue is built.
In RunMags, each issue’s flatplan is built from booked advertising orders, and editorial content is managed as stories in the same system: see how the RunMags flatplan works.
