People (magazine) members regularly slept on the floor of their offices two or three nights each week and severely limited all non-essential outside engagements. The premier edition for the week ending March 4, 1974 featured actress Mia Farrow, then starring in the film "The Great Gatsby", on the cover. That issue also featured stories on Gloria Vanderbilt, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the wives of U.S. Vietnam veterans who were Missing In Action. The magazine was, apart from its cover, printed in black-and-white. The initial cover price was 35 cents (). The core of the small founding editorial team included other editors, writers, photographers
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Gelder took over as editor, and from the February 2001 issue was publisher as well, having bought the magazine from Ferman. John Joseph Adams was Van Gelder's assistant editor from 2001 until December 2009. Van Gelder was unable to arrest the decline in circulation, which by 2011 was down to less than 15,000. Van Gelder reduced the publication frequency to bimonthly, increasing the page count and price. Charles Coleman Finlay guest-edited the July/August 2014 issue, and was hired in 2015 as full-time editor, beginning with the March/April 2015 issue. Boucher and McComas's original goal for the new magazine was to