In 1893 Munsey became one of the first publishers to regularly depict a pretty young woman on the cover, and circulation was also boosted by the liberal use of illustrations.

Many popular writers appeared in its pages, including O. Henry, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bret Harte, Max Brand, Edgar Rice Burroughs, P. G. Wodehouse, Joseph Conrad, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

Munsey's Magazine showed that it was possible to set a low price in order to increase circulation and attract sufficient advertising revenue to make a substantial profit.

In 1882 Frank Munsey moved from Augusta, Maine, to New York City, intending to launch a children's magazine.

By this time Munsey had written several novels for The Golden Argosy, and he submitted one, titled A Tragedy of Errors, to Bangs, who rejected it.

[19] The size was reduced from quarto to standard,[note 3] with 96 pages per issue, and the price increased to twenty-five cents ($8.48 in 2023).

[10][19] The financial pressure on Munsey intensified, but he was able to obtain a loan for $8,000 ($271,000 in 2023) through an old friend, John Fogler, who was at that time working for the First National Bank of Leavenworth in Kansas.

[26] The change brought Munsey into conflict with the American News Company (ANC), the distributor of almost all magazines of that time.

[27] Initially ANC refused to handle the magazine at any price, but eventually they offered him four and a half cents.

He notified about ten thousand dealers that ANC would not carry Munsey's Magazine, but that it could be had directly from the publisher for seven cents in New York plus the cost of shipping.

Munsey knew many of the dealers, and added personal letters to the notification, but fewer than a hundred orders came in response.

[37][6] Rotary presses, developed in the 1860s and gradually improved over succeeding decades, began to be used for magazines in the 1880s, and in 1898 Munsey acquired one that could produce tens of thousands of copies an hour.

Munsey had built a modern printing plant which reduced costs, and most of the writers used, for both fiction and editorial material, were not expensive.

[26] Initially the contributors were not well-known writers, except for Horatio Alger, whose novelette "A Fancy of Hers" appeared in the March 1892 issue.

Other well-known authors followed, including F. Marion Crawford, H. Rider Haggard, Anthony Hope Hawkins, Myrtle Reed, and Grace MacGowan Cooke.

[57] When Argosy began its fiction-only policy at the end of 1896, Munsey heavily re-used reprinted fiction from the magazine's earlier monthly issues.

[61][53] In the middle of the 1890s Munsey's became known for printing images of "half-dressed women and undressed statuary", in the words of an editorial in The Independent.

[6][62] The magazine grew to 160 pages of reading matter, with an article on "Artists and Their Work", leading each issue, a natural vehicle for numerous halftones.

[57] After the Spanish–American War began in April 1898, the regular lead article became "In the Public Eye" rather than "Artists and Their Work", but photographs, now on military topics, were still frequent.

New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt and U.S. House Speaker Thomas B. Reed each wrote articles for Munsey's in 1899, and a series called "My Favorite Novelist and His Best Book" brought contributions from Arthur Conan Doyle, Bret Harte, and Frank R.

[57] Munsey argued that the short unsigned articles by his house staff, in departments such as "In the Public Eye", "The Stage", "In Vanity Fair" (society events and gossip), and "The World of Music", had "done more than anything else to individualize the magazine [and] to popularize it".

[68] World War I brought more articles on military topics, often written by members of the government, including Robert Lansing, William C. Redfield, and Franklin Knight Lane.

Mott describes the nonfiction in the period 1916 to the end of the decade as "unusually interesting and varied", citing work by Richard Le Gallienne, Brander Matthews, and Ann O'Hagan, among others, but adds that the magazine was "on a lethal toboggan", with circulation declining.

The "complete novel in each issue" policy, tried in 1892, was revisited in the mid-1910s, with contributions from P. G. Wodehouse, Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett, and others: serialization of longer works was tried again, along with variations in the length of the fiction.

The authors printed came from both the pulp magazines and the upmarket slicks, and included Max Brand and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

[78] The revolution Munsey's began led to a huge expansion of the market for general magazines, and the new leaders of the field were published by men primarily interested in making money, rather than in culture.

[81] Other assessments of Munsey have not been so kind: "a man with no real sense of what values or ideas he wanted his magazine to convey" is one academic comment.

[14] Richard H. Titherington was made editor of the monthly Munsey's Magazine from its first issue in 1891,[19] and stayed in that role until 1929.

[88] Surviving copyright records indicate that Munsey's Weekly appeared on a regular schedule until at least the January 21, 1890 issue.

[89] A British edition of Munsey's Magazine was begun in 1899, printed in New York and distributed in the UK by Horace Marshall & Son.