“The beauty of the Australian magazine market has always been that entry to it was reasonably uninhibited.” Publishers Australia executive director Chris Tchakalian
He was quoted by Sally Jackson in The Australian yesterday. By “uninhibited” he means that newsagents wore the costs. We take new titles, pay who all the stock we are sent, put them o the shelves, return what we don’t sell and wait a month or two for a credit for the returns to come back to us. New titles are often cash-flow negative for a year, sometimes more. Tchakalian goes on…
“You can have the best magazine going but the public will never see it,” he said.
“What you will see is a crippling of the opportunities to launch new titles by the medium to small publisher …
The best way for niche publishers to get their product in front of consumers is to respect newsagents and deal with them on commercial terms. The current magazine model does not respect newsagents for these niche titles. These publishers want us to consider them as charity cases. No. Thanks to decades of this charity work newsagents need some charity of their own. Niche publishers need to either run by business principles or close down. The current situation cannot continue.
I wish Sally Jackson had spoken to newsagents about this problem with niche titles. I’d like her to read my magazine cash-flow report and see the evidence of the cost of these titles of small businesses which can ill-afford such an impost.
It has been my experience that it is the distributors – not the publishers – that cause delays in crediting unsold copies etc. We have tried to deal one-on-one with a number of local newsagents, but they won’t deal with small publishers without representation from distributors due to the additional administration required to deal with individual publishers, despite the more efficent turnaround and more personal interaction.