[Editor’s Note: This is part 3 of an ongoing series, The Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Flipboard Pro. Start here!]
Originally, Flipboard was ‘just’ a reader, albeit a nice one. But in the beginning of this year, they opened up the option for users to create their own magazines and that gave Flipboard a whole new dimension.
Here’s how you can make your own!
What’s a Flipboard Magazine?
So let’s dig a little deeper into creating such a Flipboard magazine. First of all, create is not really the right word here, it’s actually curating. That’s because usually most of the content you use won’t be your own, but content from others you ‘curate’ into a magazine.
Secondly, the word magazine is a bit deceptive here. Flipboard magazines aren’t periodical for example, they’re created once and then you keep adding to them (and deleting older entries if you want). So, if you were interested in all things Mac for instance, you’d create a magazine once called ‘All things Mac’ and then you’d keep adding to it. In that sense these magazines aren’t that different from the pinboards on Pinterest.
Also, the editing possibilities for these magazines are very limited. You can choose articles, photos and videos and more or less decide on the order you want them in and you can determine the photo for the cover, but that’s about it. And even doing that isn’t as user friendly and intuitive as one would hope.
Still, it’s kind of cool to assemble things you find beautiful or interesting and make them into a mobile magazine, so let’s have a look at how to do this.
There are two ways of going about creating a Flipboard magazine. The first is via the Flipboard app on your iPad or iPhone and the second is via the editor. Personally, I find the latter easier to use, mostly because of the option to change the order of the stories. That’s kind of ironic obviously given the fact that Flipboard was created for the iPad.
Be aware though that synchronization doesn’t work well between desktop and app, when creating my magazine I’ve had to logout on my iPad and login again because it would not automatically refresh after making changes from my desktop.
Creating a Flipboard Magazine with the Editor
Open the Flipboard editor on your desktop or notebook. It will ask you to log in with your Flipboard account. You’ll see the option ‘Create a magazine’.
Click it. Now choose a name for your magazine, a description and a category. If you want your magazine to be found, make sure you use relevant search terms in your name and description. My magazine is on youth ministry, so I used that in the description. You can also choose to keep your magazine private, so others can’t read it. That’s it for the basics, you can always edit the name and description later on.
Now the trick is to find things you want to add to your magazine. The first thing you’ll need is the Flipboard Bookmarklet for your browser. Now anything you come across on the web can be ‘flipped’ into your magazine. Just find a post you like, click the ‘Flip it’ button in your bookmarks and this screen appears:
You can choose the magazine you want to add it to and even add a caption if you want. Voila, that’s done.
You can also add YouTube videos by opening them on the YouTube site and then use the Flipboard Bookmarklet to flip them into your magazine. The same goes for photos.
Flipboard claims that you can also flip photos directly from for instance Instagram, Flickr and Pinterest. I haven’t tried the first ones because I don’t use them, but with Pinterest I ran into some weird bugs. Sometimes it would flip the picture, sometimes it would just show the name of the link. I haven’t been able to figure out what the problem is.
Once you’ve assembled some great content, you can change the order by dragging the items. It’s important to know that the last item added is used as the cover, but you can change this easily. Just choose the cover you want and click in the little rectangle button below it to make it the cover photo. If you want to delete an item, click on the trash can.
Of course, you can’t really see what your magazine looks like on your desktop, so by then you’ll have to switch to your iPad.
Creating a Flipboard Magazine on Your iPad
The second way of creating a magazine is via the iPad app (or Android app, but I’m using the iPad version here). The first part is exactly the same, only adding content is a little different. There is a bookmarklet that’s supposed to make ‘flipping’ content you come across possible, but I haven’t been able to get it to work yet.
That means that most of your content will have to come out of magazines you’re subscribed to (you can flip articles you like into your own magazine, much like the repining on Pinterest) or from sites/feeds you’re subscribed to. If you’re reading a Flipboard magazine, you can flip the content to your own magazine by tapping the + button. Just choose the magazine you want to add it to and add a caption if you want.
The same goes for websites you read via Flipboard, each article has that same + sign you can use to add it to your magazine.
When you’re happy with the magazine you’ve created, you can share it via email, Twitter of Facebook. Just open your magazine and on the front page, there’s a sharing button.
People obviously can only see it on a mobile device. If they are Flipboard users, they can subscribe to your magazine and thus get all new additions in their Cover Stories.
That latter is something to keep in mind. You do not create a new version of a magazine every say two weeks, you keep adding to the same version. Of course you can decide to delete older stories to prevent your magazine from expanding into a book, but the idea is to create one magazine per niche or topic and then keep updating that.
Adding Contributors
A fairly new feature on Flipboard is that you can add other contributors to your magazine, meaning you can co-create a magazine with several people. Quite handy if you’re part of a bigger team that wants to use Flipboard. Just tap or click the ‘Invite contributors’ button which will open your email app and let you send an email to people you want to contribute to your magazine.
I’d love to see examples of Flipboard magazines ChurchMag users created, so if you’re a curator please share your link!
Jeff Grosse says
Rachel, thank you for writing this series. Though Flipboard is not a perfect app, I find it is a great way to curate some of the content I’m already sharing by other means, yet doesn’t necessarily stay sticky due to the fast and ephemeral nature of news streams like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Flipboard gives me a place where I can put some of my favorite articles and they are gathered together for readers rather than spread out amongst other content. I also like the nature of “reflipping” articles and getting notified when my articles get added to someone else’s magazine. Lastly, I like to see the numbers of followers to the magazines as well as how many articles they’ve been flipping through. It helps me know that they’re staying engaged and hopefully if I keep adding more content they like, it will keep gaining traction.
So far, I am curating two magazines for two of my favorite topics, both related to cloud computing as that’s my profession. The first is “The Salesforcer” http://flip.it/FIHGN and is related to Salesforce.com. My second one is “The Curious Evernoter” http://flip.it/4gZKu about getting the most out of Evernote.
Harsh says
You are right. Flip book still needs work to make it a viral entity like Twitter or Pinterest. Started my magazine a couple of weeks back. I mostly use it for my personal purpose. Would love to see if I can use it for business purposes as well.
Author, Entrepreneur – http://harsh.im
Rachel Blom says
You’re very welcome Jeff and thanks for sharing the links to your magazines! I think Flipboard is still developing and that we can expect more and more features, they just announced this week for instance that magazines will be viewable on desktops as well (I’ll update the series to integrate this change). I agree that some more statistics would be nice too, it would encourage those who are serious about building a readership. I for one am curious to see where Flipboard is headed and I can see its potential!
Dan King says
I created one called the ‘Leadership and Youth Ministry’ Magazine. Check it out at http://t.co/98BxUfHAEc and let me know what you think!
Rachel Blom says
I saw your magazine actually, it’s one of the very few youth ministry magazines available!
Jenn says
Hi Rachel,
Thanks for your sharing. Great info. Can I ask you something? I noticed when we continue to flip contents into our magazine, some articles (which originally has a picture to it when we first flipped it), not will not be shown.
Is how the articles being layout has to do with the screen size? (say viewing on desktop/MAC can be different from viewing the same magazine on say ipad. Example, the number of articles featured on each devices are different.
Another follow up question is that, is there a way for me to make sure that EACH article that I flip, will come with the featured picture I chose for the article when I first flipped it?
Looking forward to your assistance or advice.
Thanks so much in advance.
Jenn
Rachel Blom says
Sorry for the delay Jenn, I tried finding answers to both your questions but that doesn’t seem to be easy. The layout differs per device used and the corresponding screen size, but: the number of articles should be the same. What I’ve noticed myself however is that the syncing between devices isn’t great, often I need to log out and log in again to get the updated magazines. No idea why, must be some kind of bug they’re still working on. So that might be your problem too.
As for the second problem, you can choose the image for each article. I usually use the flip button in Chrome on my desktop and it gives me all possible options for a featured picture. Once I chose that, it should stick to that one. From your question I gather that you’ve had pictures change from the one you chose? What do you use to flip articles?
yash says
Thanks its a great article , inspired me to get one for myself.
Rachel Blom says
Thanks, you’re very welcome 🙂
Chris Becker says
I loved the article is there a maximum number of articles that can be displayed? I tried to list all of my articles from my blog into my magazine to find that some of the beginning articles I published disappeared. I am not really sure what happened. I do love the idea and that people have a chance to see my photography in a new light. You can check out my magazine at http://flipboard.com/@glitchman2/glitchman2-manazine-cc2ggualy I love my photos and don’t mind sharing them.
Thank you for the article,
Chris Becker
Sean says
If I am reading a magazine, sometimes I am 20 or 30 articles in, then need to leave and come back. When I come back, is there a way to skip ahead those 20 or 30 articles to where I left off? I.e., is there a way to skip ahead in a magazine? I like the flipping concept, but sometimes I want to “fast forward”.
Rachel Blom says
Good question Sean. I wasn’t able to find an answer unfortunately…Sorry!
Marla Davis says
How do you delete articles in a magazine that you’ve already read or aren’t really relevant to what you want to read and you don’t want it to appear again? I.e., in my magazine for sewing, I get political articles like refugees sew their mouths shut in protest.
shobhit says
I read this article and learn lots of important things 5 star from my side to this article and yes Flipboard is very good for bloggers
John Walters says
Suddenly I have lost all content in about 1/3 of the magazines I follow. They say content not available. Why is that? And is there someway to get them back? What’s odd is that I don’t have that problem on an older iPad.
Rachel Blom says
Ow, that sucks John! I’m sorry, but I have no idea why that happened. Did you recently update the Flipboard app? Sometimes updates cause weird bugs, but this seems a big one. Maybe contact Flipboard and see if they can help? Good luck!
Utsav Srinet says
Flipboard can be used in such an efficient way to drive traffic, I do not have any idea about it. Let me implement the changes suggested by you and will come up with the result. Thanks for the wonderful article.
Paul says
All I get are issues, I uploaded 6 articles hours ago they don’t show at all, is there a lag time during busy hours? I also cant get pictures to load. I do have a Wix site Pro version but I cant find if that is an issue or not. The only articles I can load properly are from my instagram account. And they are not exactly articles.
Rachel Miedema says
The fact that Flipboard can be mega slow is a common issue, unfortunately. Try googling ‘Flipboard won’t load’ or something similar. You’ll see that you’re not the only one struggling with this…