I (Karen Gass) started Ruby Magazine this last May. It was a flash of inspiration/idea after I had been praying about a project I could do with a friend. I was thinking along the lines of a blog and some tutorials, but God had different ideas and Ruby was born. Previously I was publishing Cotton Spice Quilting Magazine, so creating a ‘magazine’ was familiar territory. (both Cotton Spice and Ruby are online, not printed) And it became a women’s magazine because I was not able to find any women’s magazines that covered the things I was interested in, and I figured I couldn’t be the only one!

Ruby is for women of all ages. We have 15 different departments in each issue of Ruby, and 15 editors in charge of each one.

• The Home with Amy Cavaness
• Fashions of the Era’s
• Gina Ross – paper doll with Rochelle Martin
• Coloring pages that coordinate with our Devotions, with Rochelle Martin
• Hobbies with Karen Gass
  
• Gardening with Aunt Dots
• The Adventures of Flat Sydney with Margaret Bucklew. Sydney is a character Margaret created and we take her with us when we go interesting places and take pictures of Sydney doing fun things with us
• WAHM’s with Katie Cunningham
• Ruby’s Closet with Bridgett Stemplinger
• Cooking with Le-Teisha Robinson
• Devotions with Susan Peterman
• Fun and Puzzles with Beth Brubaker
• Music with Cala Martin
• “Secrets About Love” by Laura Day, a continuing story
• Homeschool with Melissa Warren
• Stationery by Karen Gass

And then we also include pictures and stories from our readers, and any other special things that come up. I try to include a Charity spotlight in the issue when I can.

The purpose of Ruby is to provide the support women need, the comfort they want, some entertainment along the way, and information on subjects they are interested in. We welcome reader participation.

We also have a social networking site for Ruby subscribers. This is a private site, only available to subscribers, so we are assured that ‘strangers’ don’t show up there. We feel free to share pictures of our kids and grandkids. We have projects going on there – a stitchery BOM, some challenges, lots of chit chat, tips and ideas, groups for nearly every department. It’s fun!

There is a lot going on at Ruby, between the blog and the social networking site. Currently we have the Fruit of the Spirit Stitchery BOM going on. Every block is provided in each issue of Ruby, but since we only publish an issue every 2 months, the inbetween months block is published on the blog. This provides continuous coverage for the participating reader, and also, I hope it pique’s the interest of those who haven’t purchased a copy yet!

There will be blog projects, interviews, give-aways, and contests. Our next big blog project starts on Dec 1 with the Days of Christmas. Ruby Editors have put together some really clever and fun tutorials for Christmas decorations and gifts and some Printables such as Gift Tags.

Our hope and desire is to provide a magazine that women love. We don’t do things like gossip or diets or show you the must have skinny jeans this year, or advertise expensive creams or jewelry. There are NO ads in Ruby, except for WAHM ads and those are free!

In deciding on a selling price, we figured our budget to the penny. So, that each editor gets paid, and a little per issue for things like advertising and marketing, then we gave that price to each issue. $2.75 an issue, for more or less 100 pages of truly awesome magazine AND about 60 pages of printable downloads. That’s a lot of value! A 6 issue subscription costs 13.75, again, figured the same way. Money is tight everywhere these days, but we still need a little something for ourselves. This is an affordable ‘something for yourself’.