For years the Australian Women’s Weekly cookbooks owned the cookbook segment in newsagencies. Now, they account for half the sales thanks to other titles and magazines which satisfy the interest through special themed issues. With retail space, especially in shopping centres, costing so much, we need to allocate space carefully. We have not reviewed our AWW cookbook space allocation for several years. We plan to do this in the next few weeks bu carefully analysing return by title. Ideally, I would like to reduce stock on hand to three per title and to have replacement stock ordered when I am down to one. ACP has our sales data so this ought to be easily achieved. Their supply chain can quickly ship replacement stock. It is better for me that they are the warehouse and not my shop.
We have the same space allocation for cookbooks that we have for crosswords. Crossword sales are double those for food and they are growing at four times the rate for food.
Mark, great to hear your feedback on this. It is something that has bugged me for sometime – we seem to have so much space allocated to these cookbooks and they arrive in such huge numbers that finding space is a problem. We have been culling them quite brutally – getting rid of any older titles (my thoughts are the same – we can order in for specific requests).