How to Make a Magazine Table of Contents

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Laura Turner, and today I'm going to talk with you about how to write a magazine table of contents. A magazine table of contents is extremely important for readers because they're going to want to know what exact page stories are on so that they can find the story, because often there are very many pictures and advertisements within the magazine they're not part of the numbering system here. So first of all you're going to want to make it a very clear table of contents, and hopefully you're going to want to put it very close to the beginning of the magazine, though I have actually of course read magazines where the table of contents is about 20 or 30 pages in to the magazine itself and that gets a little annoying. So think about where you're putting your table of contents, it should go towards the beginning of the magazine, like it does in this issue of Southern Lady Magazine. Then you're going to want to sort of group, as I do here, your page numbers alongside the stories. Try to keep them in order, as in this little section here however we have this section Southern Spotlight pages 18 through 22, and then we have another section, Departments, then we skip back to page 14 and we start going from there. So it's not necessary to chronologically number all this stuff, but it's more necessary to sort of keep it within categories, so that you can find what you need in this category, and then from within the category start numbering chronologically. Because of course here we have see, the very first category, Delights, it's page 94, which of course is not the first page of the magazine. So it's not so such important to keep it chronological as it is to keep it within categories. Also of course make sure that you point out the cover story in its own separate category, because a lot of times people are going to pick up the magazine. This particular magazine has a really awesome pecan pie on the front, I'm probably going to want to know ow to make that pecan pie pretty quickly, as far as where I want to look it up and where I want it to be. So I'm going to be able to see that in its ow little box. So make sure that all that stuff is detailed for people reading your magazine so that they can get through it quickly and efficiently and have fun reading it."