We received way too many copies of The Monthly summer edition and returned almost all. The latest issue with a Kevin Rudd cover we received a quarter of the summer allocation and will sell out. We are chasing more stock and hopefully will get this. It is frustrating to be oversupplied for the long on-sale issue and cut back too far for the regular monthly issue.
The Monthly is one of those magazines where our sales very much depend on the cover story. If we had had enough stock from day one we could have sold four times the allocation.
To those in publishing businesses who throw their arms up at this – a newsagent saying they don’t get enough of this an too much of that – it happens. Walk in our shoes for a month and you will soon see the craziness of the magazine distribution model which causes us such frustration.