Mindfood magazine turns up

Michael McHugh, the creator of Notebook, is behind Mindfood, a new magazine which lobbed into newsagencies yesterday morning, unannounced. While it is good to have a new magazine I would have liked to receive some marketing collateral with which to promote the new arrival.

Mindfood will be a tough sell given its broad and innovative focus – News, Society, Health & Wellness, Environment, Culture, Food & Travel and Brain Teasers – it is more of a movement than a magazine. I like the magazine, it’s a quality title in terms of production and content – I still think it will be a tough sell.

As happens with all new titles, McHugh is relying on the charity, yes, charity, of newsagents to get his new baby off the ground. I received 20 copies and am supposed to leave these on the shelves for two months. My investment is $148.50 for stock and $35.00 for real-estate and labour over these eight weeks. Unless I achieve a sell through of 60% or above, I’ll lose money on this title for the next year.

Given the 28% discount offered for people who subscribe through the website, I would have thought that a higher commission, and not one-off, for newsagents would be good. It would certainly focus the minds of newsagents more on the title – 35% or above for the first two years. Let me make some money back.

It’s a catch-22 situation with new magazine titles. I want to be a magazine specialist. To earn that mantle I need to support new titles. However, the magazine distribution model leaves newsagents carrying more cost than the benefit warrants. We have no share in ad revenue nor do we charge for access to our real-estate and labour assets. The magazine distributors, journalists and just about everyone else except the investors get paid for their services. Newsagents carry more risk than all of them, except the investors. Ours is not a traditional risk/reward model. And publishers wonder why newsagents don;t always act like business people.

But this is the magazine distribution model and no one seems prepared to change it so we go on. We have co-located Mindfood next to our women’s weeklies section, in our front of the shop magazine feature display and also in the general women’s interests section. Hopefully it will find customers and we’ll get something close to the 60% sell-through we need.

UPDATE:  I missed the announcement sent by the distributor on this.   Marketing collateral is on the way.  A couple of newsasgents contacted me with good stories about the title – I am looking forward to driving sales.