Crow Toes Quarterly offers 4 PDF copies for $5

It's nice to see little magazines, with limited resources, innovating. Case in point is Crow Toes Quarterly, which offers a one-year, four-issue e-zine subscription to its magazine (which is about children's literature) for $5.

We’ve taken all those great words and illustrations and we’ve crammed them into this magical doohickey and we’ve turned them into these little files called PDFs, which can be opened and saved on any computer.

Now, as soon as an issue of CTQ is complete, you can have it on your computer, in all its amazing amazingness. Isn't that amazing?

 It also sells single PDF copies of back issues for $1.50. The magazine also sells individual single copies of the print edition.

While this may not be the absolute answer for other small magazines and their wrestling with back issue inventories and guesstimating print runs, it's worth considering, along with print-on-demand copies served through a third-party provider.