About this episode
A different kind of episode — no guest this time, just Jannis. In about six weeks, Magic Pages is heading to IndieCon, an independent publishing festival in Hamburg that's almost entirely about print: magazines, zines, small books, art prints — things printed with ink on paper. Magic Pages is a Ghost hosting company, so the obvious question is what a web hosting company is doing at a print festival. That's what this episode is about.
The short answer: print publishers and online publishers are fighting the same fight — for ownership of their work and a direct relationship with their readers, with no big platform in the middle. Jannis walks through what Magic Pages is bringing to IndieCon — a hands-on Ghost workshop, a small magazine called A Press of Your Own, and a community dinner — and the two things he most wants to learn back from the print world: how to talk honestly about fair pricing, and how a scene built on trust actually forms. Plus how you can win a ticket, and a seat at the dinner.
Chapters
- 0:00 — Welcome — why this one's just me
- 0:59 — Why is a web hosting company sponsoring a print festival?
- 1:24 — What IndieCon actually is
- 4:04 — The same fight: print and online publishers
- 6:35 — It comes down to ownership
- 7:14 — Valuing the work over the scale of the work
- 8:19 — How we want to show up — not there to sell
- 8:52 — The workshop: from first post to paid members
- 9:21 — Why a workshop and not a talk
- 11:36 — The magazine — A Press of Your Own
- 14:13 — Who's coming, and a dinner in Hamburg
- 15:07 — Learning from print: fair pricing
- 17:03 — Learning from print: a scene built on trust
- 19:08 — Win a ticket (and a seat at dinner)
- 20:29 — Closing
Links & mentions
- IndieCon — the independent publishing festival in Hamburg, 4–6 September 2026
- Ghost — the open-source publishing platform everything at Magic Pages runs on
- help@magicpages.co — email us to enter the ticket giveaway (by 26 July 2026) or just to say hi
- Oberhafen-Kantine — the ~100-year-old harbour canteen where we're hosting the Saturday dinner
Transcript
Jannis: Hi, and welcome to the Magic Pages podcast, the podcast where we sit down with the people building, hosting and publishing on Ghost. Today is going to be a slightly different episode because it will just be me. I want to talk to you about something I've been thinking about for a while. In about six weeks, Mariia, our first customer and friend, Christine, and myself will take a train to Hamburg. Why? Well, because Magic Pages is sponsoring a festival called IndieCon. IndieCon is a festival for independent publishers. It's happening every year in Hamburg, and what might surprise you? It's mostly focused on print, magazines, zines, small books, art prints, things you can hold, things printed with ink on paper usually.
And Magic Pages, well, if you're new here, is a web hosting company. We host ghost sites, online publications, newsletters, blog, that kind of thing. So the question. I want to discuss with you today is essentially why a web hosting company is sponsoring a print festival. What are we doing there? And more importantly, what am I hoping the people that visit us there will get from it? And a small teaser? We have a couple of tickets for the conference left, so stay until the end to find out how you can get one of these and also have Magic Pages pay for your dinner. Let me start with a bit of a deeper dive into what IndieCon actually is, because most people listening to this probably haven't heard of it.
IndieCon runs from September 4th to 6th in Hamburg at a venue called Gleishalle. That's essentially an old freight hall by the harbor, so very industrial, very urban. It's been running for over a decade at this point, and unlike most bigger conferences, it doesn't have a big company behind it. It's run and organized by a small team who wanted a space where the independent publishing world could come together internationally, not just German speaking. And how it was described to me is basically that if you walk into IndieCon you'll see tables, lots of them, rows of them, and behind each of these tables there's a publisher.
So someone who makes a magazine, a zine, a book, some of them are very small, some of them are one-person operations, some of them are a little bit bigger. Some print 200 copies of an issue, some print 2000, and there's a Portuguese photography magazine next to a German literary journal, next to a Ukrainian art publication, next to a food zine from Copenhagen. And what unites all of these people is that they made the thing. They decided what goes in it, they chose the paper, they chose the printer, they took the risk to print something that they believed in, and nobody at Meta or Google decided what would perform well or adjusted the design. Nobody quietly shifted the algorithm, they just made a magazine, wrote content for it, printed it, and brought it to this venue in Hamburg to sell it and talk to people about it.
That's the atmosphere that sold me when I first heard about it. And. I am by far the least analog person you can imagine. Literally everything in my life is digital. It's not a trade show, there's also not a keynote speaker that used to, you know, work at Google or Apple or whatever that will tell you about the future of media. There's no exhibitors selling you ads or analytic tools or CRMs or anything like that. It's the kind of event where people talk about actually making things instead of growth hacks and funnels. And it's kind of scary thinking about walking into that as a web hosting company.
So the real question is, what are we doing there? I've thought about this a lot, honestly, when the organizers approach the ghost community and they essentially just post it in the ghost forum, they also mentioned that there will be podcast hosts and newsletter creators, kind of the people we talk to every day at Magic Pages anyway. And that made me realize that the print world and the online publishing world are actually not that different. We essentially fight the same fight. We want to produce something that we have control over. We want to share something we're passionate about. And most importantly, neither side wants a big company in the middle of that relationship with our readers, not a print distributor deciding which magazines go out to which stores.
No social media platform deciding which posts get shown to which readers. Zine maker and the newsletter writer are, in my eyes, two versions of the same person. They're just working with different materials. And that's where we're going. Not because we've suddenly decided, or because we think IndieCon goers are potential Magic Pages customers, we're going because the people at IndieCon are very similar to the people we talk to every day. They're just doing it, as I said, on another material. See, the thing is, when you sit with this for a while, you realize that the tools and the medium are just two sides of the same metal.
When I wrote the script of this episode, I started with a very vague idea, and the more. I wrote and wrote about it, the clearer it became. Zine maker prints 300 copies of something. They sell them by hand at festivals like IndieCon, or they mail them to subscribers, or maybe they leave a stack at their favorite independent bookshop. They know their readers not as a number in an analytical dashboard, but as people. They probably recognize faces that keep buying their magazines in person, and they know which magazine goes to which shop. A ghost publisher, a newsletter writer, maybe an independent journalist, or a small magazine that publishes on their own domain already does the exact same thing digitally.
Most of our customers have a couple of hundred subscribers for the newsletters. They know a lot of their readers by name, because those readers reply to the newsletters. Same thing happening on Magic Pages. When I send out a newsletter, I get replies from actual people, and I know those people by name. When you send a message to our customer support chat, we usually know you by name, because maybe we've been in touch before. Those ghost publishers, they pay attention to, cancels their newsletters and subscriptions and why. They know their community as people, and not as monthly active user numbers. Both of those publishers, the zine maker or the newsletter creator, they made an active choice at some point.
They chose not to publish on Medium or Substack, or on some big platform that would give them a bigger audience, but take a cut. Instead, they chose a smaller, more direct route. They chose ownership, essentially. Because that's really what it comes down to, ownership. Owning your publication, owning the relationship with your readers, owning the ability to move if you need to move, and not being at the mercy of a platform that could decide tomorrow that your kind of content is no longer welcome. And that's what.
I mean by the same fight. It doesn't matter if you're printing with ink or publishing to your own domain. The impulse is the same. I want to make this thing, I want to get it to the people who want it, and I don't want anybody in the middle who can take that away from me. And there's a second thing that connects those two worlds, which might be even more important. Both of them value the work itself more than the scale of the work. You don't start printing a small, independent magazine because you want to build a media empire. You do it because you love the thing you're making. You want to spread the message you're printing. And the same thing goes for a ghost publisher.
The people I talk to who run small newsletters, they're not trying to reach millions of people. They just want to make something good and share it with the people who care and be able to keep doing it. And that's a completely different angle from the one that dominates most conversations about publishing right now. Most of it is about growth. How do you grow your list? How do you scale your operation? How do you optimize your funnel?
But in my eyes, the independent publishing world, whether it's print or online, is often actively suspicious of that framing because growth isn't the point. The work is the point. And that's the kind of person. I want Magic Pages to serve. That's who Sviatoslav, Mariia, and myself are actively building this for. All right. So if that's the reason we're going, then how we show up matters in my eyes. I don't want to be that tech company that just shows up trying to make sales. Now, to be fully honest with you, we are bringing discount codes. Two months for free if you decide to try Magic Pages.
But we're not going to push them. Nobody in our booth is going to try to close you on signing up for a hosting deal. The codes are there if you already know you want to try ghosting. Magic Pages happens to be the option that makes sense for you. If you leave the booth without one, that's completely fine because selling hosting was never the point of this. What we're actually spending most of our energy on is a workshop. It's called publishing online with Ghost from first post to paid members. It's going to be 90 minutes. It will be about 10 to 15 people. Everybody brings a laptop and by the end of the workshop, every single participant will have a real live Ghost site.
Not a demo, not a mock-up, but an actual working ghost site with their own writing on it, their own newsletter set up and the basics of paid memberships in place if they want to go that direction. I want to say why we picked this format because it took us a while to figure out the right shape. We could have done a talk, stand at the front, you know, at a stage, explain what ghost is, answer questions at the end. But I don't think that talks land the way I'd like because people forget them. They nod along all the time and then usually, you know, when you leave a talk like this, you never actually try what you've heard. A workshop in my eyes is different because when you leave a workshop, you either have the thing you came to make or you don't.
There's no middle ground, really. So by structuring it as this 90 minute workshop and hands-on building session, we are forcing accountability on basically ourselves, but also the participants. If you're in the room, you're building. And when you leave, you have a website. From what we've heard from the organizers, lots of publishers that come to the IndieCon Festival every year want to actually branch out into the digital world. And most of them, unfortunately, end up on Substack. And that's a pity in my eyes because the platform stands against the very thing independent publishers are trying to do, own what they create. And that's why the most important part of the workshop will be that the participants leave with a site that's theirs.
It will be technically hosted on Magic Pages for the workshop just to fit everything into those 90 minutes. But Ghost is open source and a Ghost site is portable. So any participant can pack up their content at any point. They can take the subscribers, the settings, the content, all of it, and take it somewhere else at any time. They can host it themselves. They can host it with us. They can host it at one of our competitors. If somebody walks out of that workshop and never talks to Magic Pages again, but a year from now, they're running a small independent newsletter on their own domain, that's a win for me. That's the whole reason we're doing this.
If we've helped one more person get to a place where they can publish independently, then it's all made sense for us. And that's what. I mean when I say we're not there to sell. I want to be there to give something, to show a skill, a little bit of the knowledge we've built running Magic Pages for the last three years, because. I want to be there to share that knowledge and enable people to not only be independent offline, but also online.
But that's not all because apart from the workshop itself, we're also making a small magazine. It's called a press of your own, and it's essentially a collection of four short essays about what it means to have your own place on the internet in 2026. And crucially, it is platform independent. It's not about Magic Pages. It's also not really about ghost either. It's about the deeper question of what publishers should be thinking about when they set up their own web presence. There are four essays, as I said, and I'm just going to read you the titles of them, because I think that really does a better job of describing what the magazine is than what I could do now.
The first one is called a press of your own, what the platforms keep when you write on them. And it's essentially about what sub-stack and medium keep from you, what you own, what you don't own, and what you're missing out compared to hosting your publication on an independent platform, whether that's ghost, WordPress, or anything else. The second one is called a short history of the homepage where writers used to live and where they live now. That one takes a step a little bit back, and it talks about this full circle moment where, you know, in the 90s and early 2000s, there were a lot of those personal homepages websites where people wrote about their day-to-day, and then we kind of took this side quest towards social media that we've been on for the last 10, 15 years.
And now I think we're coming back to this full circle moment where people start realizing that maybe publishing on their own website, their own homepage might actually be worth it. The third one is called Five Places Worth Visiting, a short tour of publications on their own addresses, and that one introduces five publishers who already do what we talk about at IndieCon. It will also feature a couple of Magic Pages customers, also a couple of other ones that might not be publishing on Ghost at all.
So it's really just like a little place to start where you can dig in and just see what cool things people are doing already. And the last one is called Writing That Lasts 10 Years, on longevity, archives, and what survives. Again, a counterpoint to the social media stream that just, you know, scrolls by, that just flashes by, where everything is this so-called short form content. And it talks a little bit more about longevity and making sure that your writing survives the next decade and even more than that. The magazine itself will be a small print run, so we only print as many copies as we think we can give to people at the conference. And it will also be available online on our website once the conference starts.
So it's not there yet, but once the conference starts in the beginning of September, it will also be on our website. And last but not least, we are also bringing ourselves. So Mariia and I are coming. Christine, who you've met in the second episode of this podcast, is also coming. And a couple of Magic Pages publishers might show up there as well. I'm already talking to a couple of them. So let's see how that goes. And we're also hosting a small dinner on Saturday evening, September the 5th, in a small restaurant right next to the venue. It's called the Oberhafen-Kantine, and it's a 100-year-old institution, Hamburg. The dinner itself is, I think, where a lot of the real conversation will happen.
And as I mentioned in the beginning, there is a chance to win not only tickets to the IndieCon, but also an invitation to this very dinner. So, yeah, that's our presence at IndieCon, a workshop, a magazine, a booth to talk to us, and a dinner on Saturday. But let's be honest, we're not just going to IndieCon to give something. I also want us to learn something, specifically, how can Magic Pages get better at what we do by spending three days with the people who've been doing the same adjacent thing for decades in the print world.
Because that's really the frame. I want to hold on to. We host online publishers, the people at IndieCon are print publishers, and the overlap between what those two groups need is bigger than most people would assume. And there are things the print world has figured out that would make Magic Pages a better product, a better service, and a better company if we paid attention. Let me give you two specific things that. I have in mind. The first one is around pricing, but not the pricing of our own service of Magic Pages, but the pricing our customers charge their readers. Independent magazines cost quite a lot of money sometimes, 15, 20, sometimes 30 euros for a single issue, and the readers happily pay it, because it is usually worth it.
Because a small audience can sustain something they love if you charge them what it actually costs to make. Most ghost publishers I know on the other hand are under price, they're afraid to charge 10 euros a month because they don't want to lose subscribers, so instead they charge smaller numbers and struggle to sustain the work, which then becomes our problem too as a hosting company, because a publisher who can't sustain their work is a publisher who eventually stops publishing, and a publisher who eventually leaves us.
So what. I want to learn from the print world is how do they help each other to get comfortable with fair pricing? Is there a language they use, a framing that works, a set of examples they point to? Because if we can bring that to our customers, that's a real service to them, to help show them that charging what the work is worth isn't greedy. But actually what makes independence sustainable. It won't be a course, it won't be a marketing gimmick. I just want to be able to have better conversations with our own community about what it takes to keep going. And the second thing, and this one is maybe the one I'm most curious about, is how the print world actually builds these relationships in their world.
Not just with readers, but with each other. The independent print scene is usually built on an infrastructure of trust that the indie web is still figuring out. Publishers know other publishers and distributors know other distributors, and that means that festivals like IndieCon exist because the community itself organizes them. Nobody made this happen top down. There was no big international publisher that said, well, let's get all the indie zine makers together. When a print publisher launches something new, they don't have to buy meta ads to find the first readers. They have a network of people who will vouch for them, distribute them and feature them, put their magazine on a shelf essentially.
The online equivalent of that is still much thinner. Most ghost publishers I know operate in relative isolation. They might follow a few other newsletters, they might occasionally do a cross promotion, but there isn't really a scene, the way there's a scene in the indie print. And that's something. I want to think about for Magic Pages as well. What could we do to help our customers get to know each other better? Not as a marketing feature and not as a community in the empty tech industry sense, but actually in a way that Indiecon manages to do it, to have this real thing that brings real publishers into the same room, whether it's virtual or physical.
So. I want to figure out whether there is a version of that for the people that we host, maybe an event, a directory, maybe it's also this podcast to a certain extent, maybe something entirely different. And we have talked about this within the Magic Pages team already, but quite honestly, we don't have the answer yet. So maybe the print world can help us figure that out to a certain extent. So yeah, those are the two things I'm carrying with me, not as rigid interview questions, just as things. I want to sit with and listen and see what shape to take when I get back home. Maybe I'll find the answers I'm looking for, maybe I don't, so who knows?
But hey, let's get to the fun part. As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, we do have a small number of IndieCon tickets to give away. I'd love it if some of you can come with us. And here's how it works. Just send a quick email to help at magicpages.co. Just tell us you'd like to come. You don't need to write anything elaborate, but it's obviously nicer for us to also get to know you a little bit. Entries close by July 26.
So this is this Sunday, right after the episode airs end of day in Central European time. So technically 11, 59 PM Central European time. We will then draw the numbers at random from everyone who put their hand up. And since it's just a few weeks before the conference, we do trust that if you put your hand up, you'll also show up there. We'll have to do a dinner reservation and it would be pity if the restaurant prepares food that nobody will eat in the end.
So if you win, we cover your IndieCon ticket. It also includes what's called the breakfast club. So you will certainly not start the day hungry and you'll also have a seat at our community dinner on Saturday. We cannot cover your travel expenses or accommodations. So have a look at that beforehand, please. And if you don't win, come anyway if you can, buy a ticket, come to the workshop, come find us at our booth, come pick up one of the magazines that we'll bring, because the whole reason we're going is to meet more of the people who care about independent publishing. And that includes everybody listening to this.
So yeah, that's it for today. If you're publishing independently, whether that's on paper, online or both, you're doing something that matters. Not because it's going to make you a lot of money or reach millions of people, but because the alternative is that publishing keeps getting more concentrated and the people making decisions about what gets read have less and less to do with the actual work. Independent publishing, print and web is the counterweight to that.
So thank you also for publishing your newsletter, your publication on Ghost or anywhere else. And if you've liked this, subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts. The next episode, we will be back with the regular format. I've got a couple of guests lined up already. And if you're coming to IndieCon or thinking about it, just send us a quick email and let us know. So see you in Hamburg and bye-bye.
