PDF magazine to Newsstand solution on low budget?
Newsstand requires building an actual iOS application, albeit a simple one. I'm not sure an English major could manage that (he says, who was once a professional computer programmer and English major).

You might be better to consider iBooks. Check out https://developer.apple.com/ibooks/

You can download iBooks Author for free in the Mac App store to build extremely nice iBooks and they can then be put into the bookstore if you have a developer account. You might then email all your subscribers with a link to grab the new issue. iBooks Author is almost as much fun to use a InDesign and certainly more fun than Pages.

If you are convinced to go the Newsstand route then I suggest you find an iOS programmer who can assist you. You will need a good understanding of the iOS WebKit framework (as the most likey way to handle your content), the Newsstand framework and the push framework at an absolute minimum. Once you have the app coded and running then the difficulty of creating an issue depends on exactly how you decide to handle it in your app. The app gets passed the issue as a bundle and how it deals with it is entirely up to your app.