In 1907, the cover price rose to 15 cents and 30 pages were added to each issue along with establishing a stable of authors for each magazine, this change proved successful and circulation began to approach that of Argosy. Howard, Talbot Mundy and Abraham Merritt.

Haggard's Lost World genre influenced several key pulp writers, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Rider Haggard, a sequel to his popular novel She. The magazine began to take off when, in 1905, the publishers acquired the rights to serialize Ayesha, by H. The Popular Magazine introduced color covers to pulp publishing. Due to differences in page layout, the magazine had substantially less text than Argosy. A dime novel and boys' weekly publisher, they saw Argosy's success, and in 1903 launched The Popular Magazine, billed as the 'biggest magazine in the world' by virtue of being two pages longer than Argosy. In six years Argosy went from a few thousand copies per month to over half a million. While the steam-powered printing press had been in widespread use for some time, enabling the boom in dime novels, prior to Munsey, no one had combined cheap printing, cheap paper and cheap authors in a package that provided affordable entertainment to working-class people. The first 'pulp' was Frank Munsey's revamped Argosy Magazine of 1896, about 135,000 words (192 pages) per issue on pulp paper with untrimmed edges and no illustrations, not even on the cover. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of 'hero pulps' pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters, such as The Shadow, Doc Savage, and The Phantom Detective. Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines are best remembered for their lurid and exploitative stories and sensational cover art. Pulps were the successor to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short fiction magazines of the 19th century. Magazines printed on better paper were called 'glossies' or 'slicks.' In their first decades, they were most often priced at ten cents per magazine, while competing slicks were 25 cents apiece.

The name pulp comes from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. Pulps were printed on cheap paper with ragged, untrimmed edges. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long. Pulp magazines (often referred to as 'the pulps'), also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s.

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